The NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS: A Closer Look

The Cards

We've recently looked at the NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS and its architecture. To recap, the 7900 GS has identical clock speeds to the 7900 GT, but with one less vertex pipeline and four fewer pixel pipelines. NVIDIA intends for it to be a direct competitor to ATI's X1900 GT, but at reference speeds the 7900 GS doesn't quite perform as high as the X1900 GT. Overclocking may improve the situation somewhat as we'll see in the next section.

Here is a breakdown of the 7900 GS cards we have for this review along with their clock speeds and prices:

GeForce 7900 GS Clock Speeds and Pricing
Manufacturer and Card	Factory Clock	Price
Albatron GeForce 7900 GS	450/660	*$200-$250
XFX GeForce 7900 GS RoHS Extreme	480/700	$211
EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GS	500/690	$216
Leadtek Winfast PX7900 GS TDH Extreme	520/700	*$220
BFG GeForce 7900 GS OC	540/660	$200

As sometimes happens, we weren't able to get prices for all of these cards at the time of this writing. The Albatron 7900 GS and the Leadtek PX7900 GS TDH Extreme are not yet available, but we've included the target street prices (marked by an asterisk) for these cards. The 7900 GS was predicted to retail at around $200, and just a few weeks after its release prices reflect this. We can't predict what the market will do, but hopefully prices for the 7900 GS will drop some in the coming months.

It's interesting that the 7900 GS card in this roundup that has the highest factory overclock is also (currently) the least expensive, and right away makes the BFG model stand out. We'll look at performance in a moment, but first let's take a closer look at the individual cards.