Leadtek PX7600GT Extreme TDH
590/800 MHz
NVIDIA GeForce 7600GT, 256 MB GDDR3Core Clock : 588 MHz
Memory Clock : 796 MHz (1592 MHz GDDR3)
Overall Score: 80.5 points
Reviewing Leadtek's graphics cards are always a pleasure, even more so if there's some custom touches here and there. It's obvious that Leadtek put some extra effort into this card. The fan is noticeably larger in diameter than the reference cooling solution and so is the heatsink. You'll notice it's a also a copper based heatsink as well. If you look under the heatsink, you'll notice Leadtek choose to use thermal paste instead of pad to help the core maintain contact with the all copper based heatsink. Unfortunately, despite the large area it covers, it doesn't come in contact with the RAM chips. All these extra touches may be a necessity for this card - the Leadtek PX7600GT Extreme comes with slightly higher clocked than the other cards in this round up. It's obvious that Leadtek is doing what they can to differentiate their product.
The packaging is typical Leadtek packaging, which we think the best we've seen so far. Inside the box, you'll find the standard accessories: an HDTV dongle and one DVI to analog dongle. That's probably the only gripe we have with this card. With such a premium offering, you expect more - a S Video extension cable and a second DVI to analog dongle will be nice. Thankfully, Leadtek is nice enough to bundle two games - Serious Sam II and Trackmania Nations and the obligatory installer with utilities and a DVD playback software.
With a larger heat dissipation area and fan, we have high hopes for this card. Let's look how the Leadtek PX7600GT Extreme fares after a session of Quake 4.
Well, 54° Celsius at full load. It is cooler than both ASUS EN7600GT, though not as good as the Gigabyte GeForce 7600GT with a low RPM, 8 cm fan. Frankly, we expect better from this card since it obviously has the edge in this department. Could it be the higher clocked core is putting more heat on the heatsink? Actually, no. Looking at the fan control settings, we can why it perform this way. The fan speeds are very conservative indeed.
These settings are the standard default settings of the card. No doubt, these settings are used to maintain a low noise profile. However, we were curious just how much effective Leadtek's custom cooling solution really is. So, we ran the card a second time, but this time we change the fan control settings to 65% - the standard value of a typical GeForce 7600GT. You can see the results we got below.
That's a new low in temperature 50° Celsius at full load. But what's impressive is that at that setting the card is just barely audible in our setup. Now, like all reviewers, a typical setup in our case is an open case environment - all the innards of the PC in a table in front of us during testing. In a typical user setup, you will likely not notice the noise at all.
The Leadtek PX7600GT Extreme has two things that makes it different from a typical GeForce 7600GT - the performance potential and it's much more effective cooling solution. We'll go into performance part later on, but as you can see, there's no doubt the PX7600GT Extreme is an exceptional card, though we still think it could be better.
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