Bjorn3D: A lot of gamers will be relieved to finally see top to bottom market coverage by NVIDIA's 7 Series. We know a lot of you were really waiting on a midrange 7 Series card, and hopefully,
the 7600 GT proved to be worth the wait to most of you. We think it's a great card and are quite impressed by its performance. XFX's 7600 GT XXX will definitely get recommended by us to gamers who need a solid gaming solution for around $200.
HardOCP: however money does play a part in your decision making then we think you'll find the GeForce 7900 GT a very impressive gaming solution for the price. The 7900 GT worked great in our box and provided a better gaming experience than the aging GeForce 7800 GT and the competition's comparable GPU. If however you already have, lets say a GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB video card, going to a GeForce 7900 GT isn't really going to be worth it as an upgrade. However, if you went straight to a 7900 GTX from a 7800 GTX 256MB video card that would be a fairly sizeable leap in the gaming experience. If you have a GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB card don't bother, the 7900 GTX isn't much of an upgrade from that.
If you've got a GeForce 6 series card however, moving to a GeForce 7900 GT may be a great option, giving you some new features and much faster performance.
Hexus.net: MSRP for NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX is $499-$649, GeForce 7900 GT is a $249-$399 part, with GeForce 7600 GT rounding out the range of new products at $199-$229 (with a $179 128MiB version, too). That puts 7900 GTX up against Radeon X1900 XT (~$499) and XTX (~$579), to which it spars decently on performance, but ultimately doesn't land a knock-out blow.
7900 GT mostly squares up to X1800 XL (~$299), which it dispatches easily (although not shown, stay tuned for its addition to our test results), beating its main ATI competitor on launch-day pricing. Lastly,
7600 GT has no trouble versus X1600 XT (~$179) (again, look out for that soon, post-CeBit). So that leaves NVIDIA with two of its new SKUs very considerable on price/performance, with the GTX one you'd have to spend much more time pondering before wanting to pick one up.
TechReport: If you want to talk about real value, though, move a step or two down to the GeForce 7600 GT and the Radeon X1800 GTO.
The GeForce 7600 GT, in particular, looks to be a great performer for the price and the new king of the sweet spot in PC graphics, much like the GeForce 6600 GT was before it. The Radeon X1800 GTO offers higher-grade hardware for another fifty bucks, but the 7600 GT achieves equivalent or better performance overall, raising the question of why the GTO should command a higher price. There is, however, one intriguing point that I'd like to note: the 7600 GT came out ahead in our timedemo tests and in 3DMark, but the X1800 GTO was faster in games we measured with FRAPS. I wish we'd had time to test with a broader range of games in order to establish whether this is a trend. We'll have to keep our eyes on that question.
