MSI NX7600GT
560/700 MHz
NVIDIA GeForce 7600GTX, 256 MB GDDR3Core Clock : 558 MHz
Memory Clock : 702 MHz (1404 MHz GDDR3)
Overall Score: 77.5 points
We were a little bit surprise when we picked up our NX7600GT sample This is the second GeForce 7600GT with a dual slot cooling solution in this round up. The design is not something we've seen before - it looks like a much more SLI friendly version of the default NVIDIA dual slot cooling solution for the GeForce 6800GT. Needless to say, we initially have high hopes for this card. However, a second look reveal that the heatsink inside is made up of aluminum. Aluminum heatsinks usually don't perform as well as copper based solutions, which does explain the thermal performance of the card.
The NX7600GT packaging is similar to the Gigabyte GeForce 7600GT, though slightly larger. The inside is a little bit different - a mix of hard, transparent plastic material with Styrofoam padding for the graphics card. The graphics card is only protected by a detachable piece of the same hard plastic. It's understandable - the graphics card it self is already well protected by the heatsink. The standard accessories are present: the HDTV dongle and a single DVI to analog dongle. By now you probably know what we're about to say - so we won't say it. You also find two CDs inside - a driver / installer CD and an applications CD. That's right - no games. A check on MSI's official website reveal that game bundles are optional, so depending on where you live, you may or may not get a game bundle. One thing for sure though, the no-game-bundle edition should be cheaper.
Although it uses a dual slot cooling solution, we didn't expect much from this card. Here is the RivaTuner hardware monitoring graph we have after several minutes of Quake with the MSI NX7600GT.
Not particularly impressive, isn't? The single slot ASUS EN7600GT fares much better in this test, despite it's smaller cooling solution. 62° Celsius at full load is slightly higher than average. We think MSI should have at least used a copper base with aluminum fins, it would have been much more effective than an all aluminum solution. A check on the fan control tab confirms our suspicion - the fan speeds are set to the default values.
We tried another run with Quake 4, but this time we set the fan control speed to 100%. No doubt the noise is much more noticeable than the other cards. Our objective here is too see what can we achieve with this setting. After about 20 minutes of Quake 4, we have the RivaTuner's hardware monitoring graph below.
Better, but you'll have to put up with the noise. At 100 % throttle, we can achieve the same full load temperatures as we have with the Leadtek PX7600GT Extreme. No doubt if you're going to buy this card, you will have to find a setting to your liking - something around 80 - 85 percent should be a fair compromise between noise and temperature. At that setting the noise is similar to what you get from the reference cooling solution on the GeForce 7900GTX and full load temperature is around 55° Celsius.
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