Home : Hardware : Reviews : XFX GeForce 7900 GS ExTreme
XFX’s higher-clocked 7900 GS makes a good case for itself as a value card when paired up in an SLI rig.
Introduction
Right now is a pretty good time to be a budget-minded PC gamer. nVIDIA’s newest GPUs, the 8800 series, just screamed into the market, heralding the future of DirectX 10 and claiming (as usual) the second coming in the process.
With the release of the 8800 GTX and GTS, older DirectX 9 cards, like the 7950 and the 7900, perfectly acceptable in their own right, become an affordable option for those gamers who want performance and quality as much as anyone else, but don’t want to drop $500+ to get it. In the case of graphics card maker XFX, you have a few options, including their higher clocked version of the 7900 GS, the ExTreme, to boost your performance that much more – and hopefully get that much more bang for your buck. But how good of an option is the XFX 7900 GS ExTreme on today's games if you choose to go the SLI route? We do the tests to find out.
Performance
While the GS is the “value” member of the 3-card 7900 series, it features the same support for SLI as every nVIDIA GPU from the Quadro on up. This means that you can pick up two GS cards for about $430 and potentially get some great performance numbers for less than you’d pay for a top of the line card; that extra $30 over XFX’s normal product offerings garnering you an extra 150 MHz on the memory clock and an extra 125 MHz on the GPU clock. You can see the full specifications on XFX’s site.
To test the XFX GeForce 7900 GS, I dropped it into my test bed, set up as follows:
Processor: AMD Athlon X2 Dual-Core 4200+ 65W
Motherboard: ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe Wireless
Memory: 2 GB of OCZ DD2 PC2-6400 Platinum Revision 2 Dual Channel RAM
Power Supply: OCZ nVIDIA SLI-Ready GameXStream 600W
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750 GB
OS: Windows XP SP2
Testing Software:
3DMark 06 Build 1.0.2
Fraps, testing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Call of Duty 2 and Battlefield 2142
