Installation

As with any graphics card, installation was far from difficult. Simply slot it in and you are ready to go. The card doesn’t require an external PCI-e power connector which is nice to see, but also really useful for anyone making a HTPC which aren’t normally housing a high wattage power supply.

Testing

Once the latest nVidia ForceWare drivers (93.71) were installed, I was ready to go. Below are the results from all the testing. Each test was run three times and the score averaged. If any of the three tests were wildly different from the previous ones, the results were scrapped and all three tests repeated.

The rig I was using to test with was the following:

AMD AM2 3800+ (running at stock speed)
Asus MSN-E motherboard
1GB OCZ (at stock PC6400 speeds)
Enermax Liberty 400w PSU

The MSI 7600GT was pitted against the 6600GT by Leadtek. With a whole extra 1000 in its name, the 7600GT should hand some ass.

For this card, we will use our new testing procedure that involves an XSR recorded demo walkthrough of Battlefield 2142. This should give you an idea of how well the latest graphics cards will play recent games. We also run all the 3Dmarks, the FEAR graphics test, X3 Reunion and Half Life 2: Lost Coast demo.

The Battlefield 2142 benchmark is run once, unrecorded, as the framerates drop too low (due to the textures being loaded into the RAM). Once the benchmark has run through once, it is restarted and recorded using FRAPS. The test runs for 148 seconds, and FRAPS is timed to stop after this time to get repeatable results.

The card was tested against a Leadtek Winfast 6600GT 128mb DDR3 in the same testing system to produce a comparison.

Click the graph to get individual data

The 3Dmarks show that the earlier renditions were obviously more CPU/RAM related than GPU. Only until '06 do we really see the 7600GT's full potential, managing almost twice the 6600's attempt.

FEAR results

Below is a percentage graph showing how much better the 7600GT is than the older 6600.

As you can see, the 7600GT is nearly twice as good as the 6600 in most tests. The most important statistic is the Battlefield 2142 result. With a gain of over 80%, this card is a solid choice.

Noise wise, the 7600GT wins hands down. The passively cooled card produces absolutely no noise, and would be perfect for anyone building a quiet PC. The 7600GT is capable of producing playable framerates (50+)on Battlefield 2142 at the highest quality with 4x anti-aliasing @ 1280x1024. Both Half Life 2: Lost Coast and FEAR also run with more than acceptable results.