The NVIDIA GeForce 7600GT is a terrific mid-range performance graphics card that is now continuing the successes of the 6600GT. Found in the $180 US price bracket, the GeForce 7600GT is a tough competitor and ATi are having a difficult time countering it. However, despite being such a good value product, the 7600GT is still fairly expensive at $180 US. This price tag will probably make it the most expensive component of any budget gaming system.

Just recently I put together a new AMD Sempron 2800+ (AM2) system with 1GB of DDR2-667 memory, an 80GB Seagate SATAII HDD, the MSI K9N Neo motherboard and of course a GeForce 7600GT. This gaming system was modestly priced, with the bulk of the hardware costing just $480 US. However, if you were to replace the 7600GT with a 7300GT, the overall cost of the system would drop to just $380 US, making it far more affordable. The question is how much will a 26% price drop affect performance?

The GeForce 7300GT specifications are surprisingly quite impressive for an $80 US graphics card. While the 7600GT boasts 12 pixel pipelines, the 7300GT still does quite well featuring a total of 8 pixel pipelines. The 90nm core also supports 4 vertex units and a 128-bit memory interface. The 7300GT does lose out when it comes to clock frequencies. This is because the core is clocked at just 350MHz, which looks somewhat bleak when compared to the 560MHz core clock of the 7600GT. The memory frequency is also quite low, as the 7300GT features GDDR2 memory clocked at 667MHz while the 7600GT runs GDDR3 memory at 1.4GHz!

Clearly the GeForce 7300GT is going to suffer performance wise due to the low core and memory frequencies. Nevertheless, we must not loose sight of what the 7300GT is, that being an $80 US budget graphics card for the masses. Keeping that in mind Gigabyte has identified the key weakness of this product and addressed it with their GeForce 7300GT Turbo Force graphics card. This 7300GT product features a core clock frequency of 450MHz which is 100MHz above spec. The memory has also been overclocked from 667MHz to a much healthier 800MHz.

Gigabyte has also taken their impressive passive cooling from the GeForce 7600GS card that I reviewed late last month. This passive heatsink design uses heatpipe technology along with a few different types of aluminum fins to cool the 7300GT. Given this passive heatsink did an excellent job of keeping the 7600GS cool at all time, I would only assume the same will be found with this 7300GT card. Not only does this heatsink do its job well, it also looks quite impressive and at $80 US this is the kind of graphics card you could actually show off!

Gigabyte is shipping their GeForce 7300GT with Hynix ICs onboard; they have used the HY5PS561621AFP-25 parts. These GDDR2 memory modules are rated at 800MHz; given that they are already clocked at this frequency, it will be interesting to see how much overclocking headroom they have. The card features 256MB of this memory onboard, utilizing a 128-bit memory bus and produces 10.7GB/s of bandwidth at the default NVIDIA clock specifications. It is interesting to note that Gigabyte uses the exact same memory chips on their GeForce 7600GS graphics card.

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