Computer Reviews

Tomshardware have produced a massive writeup on 20 graphics cards. Giving details on all of these cards gives a good idea of what to expect from the video card you want to buy.

Although there is often not much to the purchase of a video card, and usually it makes little difference if you just use the computer for standard tasks anyway, and don’t push it far, it’s different when you require high-level performance.

The test is extensive, covering most of the cards they have in their stores, looking at how each of them performs and comparing them. If you do need to get a card, make sure to check this list first.

Looking at the different chipsets that come with the different levels of cards there are some conclusions to be made.

GeForce 7600 GT based cards were found to be similar in performance to Radeon X1800 GTO cards. The GeForce was found to be better, because of cooler performance. With only 256MB of RAM it gets good performance.

Although 7800 GT and GTX cards have a hard time keeping up with the Radeon X1800 XT, they are being phased out the 7900 series cards, which perform better then their ATI counterparts.

Radeon X1900 XTX based cards perform a little faster than GeForce 7900 GTX cards. The Nvidia’s have better cooling, but this might not mean as much to those who are simply looking for the fastest card out there.

LINK

From: motherboards.org

X1900 Crossfire is currently the fastest, most feature-rich, highest image quality solution I’ve ever tested. The performance of two X1900s is simply mind-blowing when a game works with it properly. NVIDIA has a solution with four GPUs, Quad-SLI but this isn’t on the market in any numbers as of yet and will cost the buyer 2x or more a Crossfire setup. X1800 Crossfire is shown here simply to give a sense of performance if you buy a second X1800 card. X1600 Crossfire is an interesting choice in that the cards can work without a Crossfire cable.

LINK

There has been quite a shortage of 7900GT cards since they were released a little while ago. Hitting the right spot between ultimate performance and ultimate pricing, the GT has proven be a favorite amongst enthusiasts and others.

In a review at hardwarezone.com the card comes out well against its competition. It is an Nvidia reference card, which means that it is really a standard Nvidia 7900GT card with MSI’s decals on the front.

The cards main claim to fame it simply that it is good value for money, perhaps the best value for money from a high-end graphics card. It performs better than its 7800 predecessor and produces less heat due to 90nm technology and memory that is far from being pushed hard.

It was pitted against an MSI of the same range, two 7800GTX cards and an X1800 from ATI. They did not quite make it to the same level as the X1800 in 3DMark05 comparissons, but did manage to keep close when using it overclocking tool at 10% overclock.

It’s overclocking utility called D.O.T. lets you overclock the card in increments up to 10%, and you are covered under warranty even if you do use this overclocking feature, but not your own customised overclock.

An interesting point to note is that the biggest difference between cards came into play when playing games at high resolutions with all features turned on. In these tests the X1800 from ATI clearly pushed ahead of the pack, showing how much they have caught up to Nvidia.

LINK