Bargain hunting can be fun and often turns out to be very rewarding as there is generally a lot of thought and research that goes into this buying process. Personally I would consider myself quite the bargain hunter and I really enjoy picking up a good bargain. For this reason you do tend to see quite a number of "budget" type articles and reviews being published here at Legion Hardware. Lately I have built a number of sub $500 US gaming systems that have turned out to be quite powerful, managing around 100fps in Quake 4 with maximum in game settings enabled.

This kind of performance is becoming more and more achievable on a tight budget. When running a tech site such as Legion Hardware it is very easy to lose focus of what is and isn't realistic. This is because at any given time there are a handful of the latest graphics cards, processors, motherboards and memory modules just lying around begging to be used! Playing with the latest and greatest technology is fun and writing about it is also. However, can you afford to purchase and SLI GeForce 7900GTX rig thats driven by an AthlonFX processor? If you can I envy you, but thats not going to help me take you down a peg in Quake 4 now is it!

What will is an affordable gaming system that still has enough grunt to play games such as Quake 4 without too much effort. After recently spending countless hours testing the new GeForce 7300GT low-end performance part from NVIDIA there were still a few things I wanted to experiment with. Already, I have found the GeForce 7300GT to be an extremely powerful low-end solution that offers budget consumers serious value for their money.

Through overclocking I found that this 8 pixel pipeline graphics card was capable of out performing a standard GeForce 7600GS. Furthermore, the Radeon X1600 series also struggled to compete with this new low-end graphics card in a majority of games. Given the fact that this new little graphics core comes on graphics cards priced around the $80 US mark, the performance vs. price ratio is impressive. Though I must admit that without the added benefits of overclocking, the GeForce 7300GT performance is a little flat!

However this got me thinking, if a single GeForce 7300GT overclocked to a 475MHz core with a 900MHz memory frequency can defeat a standard 7600GS, what can two do in SLI mode? Running two low-end or even mid-range graphics cards in SLI mode is certainly something I would not recommend and never have. So to even think about trying overclocked 7300GT cards in SLI was way off base for me. Nonetheless, after sitting on the idea for a week I decided to get another identical card and begin testing.

The goal is simple, for this to be a feasible option the SLI GeForce 7300GT cards need to be faster than a single GeForce 7600GT. Of course without overclocking the cards this is an impossible goal, but with a decent frequency boost I think it might just be a possibility. Keeping in mind two GeForce 7300GT cards will cost roughly $160 US at this present point in time, which is of course the same price as a single GeForce 7600GT. Furthermore, a bargain hunter is not going to be keen on the idea of purchasing a new SLI motherboard, though the older 939-pin versions are now much cheaper!