They outpace ATI's Radeon X1800 GTO in CrossFire mode at every resolution on nearly every game test (the two lower-resolution Half-Life 2: Lost Coast tests excepted). When you drop in a second GeForce 7600 GT, though, Nvidia's cards shine. On F.E.A.R., the most demanding game in our benchmark suite, the Radeon X1800 GTO came out ahead, at least in single-card mode. That's impressive considering that ATI's card costs $50 more. The GeForce 7600 GT bested ATI's pricier competition, the Radeon X1800 GTO, on every Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Doom 3 test resolution. It all adds up to solid mainstream performance, especially for a sub-$200 3D card.
Also, the 7600 GT has a 128-bit memory interface, compared to a 256-bit memory interface on the more expensive cards. Besides differences in clock speeds, the primary distinction between the 7600 GT and its more expensive siblings is its use of 5 vertex shading units and 12 pixel shader pipelines, compared with 8 vertex shaders and 24 pipelines for the 7900 GT and 7900 GTX. On the technical front, the 7600 GT uses the same chip architecture as the GeForce 7800 series, but scaled down to a smaller 90-nanometer manufacturing process, which reduces costs, power demands, and heat generation. This quiet operation also makes the 7600 GT a decent choice for use in a Media Center PC, since by the time the fan kicks in, you're likely playing music, movies, or games that will drown out the noise anyway. The card's small fan is capable of generating a fair amount of noise when the GPU is hard at work rendering 3D images, but the fan spins more slowly-and quietly-when the GPU is idle. The heat sink covers only the GPU, not the memory chips, which, due to heat concerns, may hurt your ability to overclock the card. The fan and heat sink assembly on the 7600 GT is smaller than that found on earlier 7000-series cards. And if you do hit a performance bottleneck, you can always drop a second 7600 GT into an SLI-compatible motherboard. In other words, unless you absolutely must run the hottest, newest games at high resolution, Nvidia's latest budget 3D card more than suffices. While it's nowhere near as fast as the top-of-the-line card, the 7600 GT offers strong performance for the casual gamer. Enter the Nvidia GeForce 7600 GT, a card that delivers top-notch gaming performance and all the visual glitz for less than $200. Until recently, you had to spend more than $300 to get all the bells and whistles and good frame rates at high resolutions. Gamers frustrated with the expense of the relentless 3D card upgrade cycle can rejoice.
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