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Gigabyte GeForce 7900GTX
650/800 MHz

NVIDIA GeForce 7900GTX, 512 MB GDDR3
Core Clock : 650 MHz
Memory Clock : 800 MHz (1600 MHz GDDR3)

Overall Score: 85 points

Gigabyte also choose to stick to the reference design for their GeForce 7900GTX. Like so many other reference based cards, the only difference between them is the sticker on the fan. Bundle wise, the Gigabyte GeForce 7900GTX seems a little bit sparse. Unlike the other two cards, there's only one game - Serious Sam II. While it is a good game to showcase what the GeForce 7900GTX, its not our first choice for a bundle game. You'll find two additional CDs, one with drivers, manual and PowerDVD and another with Cyberlink's PowerDirector. Unfortunately, our sample didn't come with the driver CD, so we were unable to confirm what applications and utilities Gigabyte bundled with this card. We also find the accessories a little bit more wanting - there's only one DVI to analog dongle, one power cable and a HDTV cable / dongle. It would've been nice to have at least two DVI to analog dongle and an additional S-Video cable.

If you're looking for a card with the bare essentials, the Gigabyte GeForce 7900GTX fits the bill. Those of you who are interested in using a multi monitor setup with two analog monitors may be a little disappointed with this card. However, the sparse bundle should mean a more competitive price for this card and that's always a plus.

Leadtek PX7900GTX TDH
650/800 MHz

NVIDIA GeForce 7900GTX, 512 MB GDDR3
Core Clock : 650 MHz
Memory Clock : 800 MHz (1600 MHz GDDR3)

Overall Score: 87 points

Some of us are a stickler with packaging. You know the type, the one that buys hardware based on the cool-looking box. The PX7900GTX TDH comes in a standard Leadtek packaging and that's not a bad thing. It has the smallest box out of the three cards we tested, however we think it has the best packaging. And no, that's not based on the 'cool' factor. Leadtek packs their PX7900GTX TDH card in a bubble wrap to ensure no harm will come to the card due to mishandling or accidents. Most graphics card makers simply only use a plastic anti-static wrap for their card. It's nice to know some manufacturers actually go the length and we think Leadtek has the right idea here.

The bundle is standard: you get two games - Serious Sam II and Trackmania Nations. Accessories wise, there's the usual HDTV cable / dongle, a single DVI to analog dongle and one 6 pin ATX power cable. For DVD playback, Leadtek was kind enough to bundle Cyberlink's PowerDVD 6. In the driver's CD, you'll find the appropriate drivers and Leadtek's WinFox utility. Since this card is based on the reference design, the utility doesn't offer anything beyond what you get from the standard NVIDIA hardware monitoring. Too bad, maybe their slightly faster GeForce 7900GTX Extreme have more to offer, but this time we'll have to work with what we've got.

Performance

As usual, we'll be focusing on performance under default settings and 4x AA with 16x AF. Since all of these cards are basically the same, we expect very little difference between them, if any. Due to a technical difficulty, there won't be any results from F.E.A.R, but performance wise it shouldn't be that much different to the results we got in our GeForce  7900GTX review.

We'd like to thank Tagan  for supplying the additional power supply for this article.

Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ socket 939
2 x 1024 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
MSI K8N NForce 4 SLI motherboard
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
ASUS E-616 DVD-ROM
Tagan TG530-U15 530 watts ATX/BTX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
NVIDIA Forceware 84.21 reference driver
NVIDIA NForce 4 6.66 reference driver
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit 5.12.1.512 driver.
DirectX 9.0c

The graphs are pretty self explanatory, but in case you can't see the text, they're arranged in groups of three colors: green for minimum fps, blue for average fps and red for maximum fps. The first group represent test results under default settings, and the second represent results with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled.These results are in frame rate per second.

Standard settings

The results:

There seems to be some differences in the results and we think these are not all caused by variations between runs. The ASUS EN7900GTX is consistently slower than the Gigabyte GeForce 7900GTX in default settings. However, with AA and AF enabled, it's slightly faster. The Leadtek PX7900GTX is the slowest card here, only catching up to the Gigabyte's offering at 1600 x 1200, with AA and AF enabled. While the differences are small and to some extent significant (around 10 percent), you'll probably won't notice it in gameplay. Looks like most of the differences occur at very high frame rates as you can see from the very different maximum fps.

So, if it's not normal variations and we're not system limited, what can be causing these differences. Well, if you look back at early GeForce 7800GTX reviews, you'll no doubt find some references to the GeForce 7800 (which is shared by the GeForce 7900) peculiarity to fluctuate it's various clocks. We think this is the cause here. Of course, we can't really be sure until we take a look at other benchmarks to see if the trend persist.

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