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Performance

Except for the Leadtek PX7600GT Extreme, the cards are running at reference core and memory clocks. Since the ASUS EN7600GT, Gigabyte GeForce 7600GT Silent Pipe II and MSI NX7600GT are all running at the same core and memory clock, we expect little difference separating the three. For comparison purposes, we've also included results with a GeForce 7600GS.

As usual, we'll be focusing on performance under default settings and with 4x AA and 16x AF. Anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering are applied from the in-game menu settings (or console) whenever possible. V-sync was disabled on both the driver panel and within the game, if present. The settings we used for each game are pretty much the same as our usual test settings, with one exception - we turned off volumetric lights in F.E.A.R. Quake 4 was set to 'High Quality'  while for Serious Sam II we used the 'Maximum' video options preset but with custom resolutions, AA and AF settings. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was set to use its SM 3.0 rendering path with the highest detail (sans HDR).

We'd like to thank Tagan for supplying the additional power supply for this article and Gigabyte for the GeForce 7600GS card.

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.

The results:

From a glance, it's hard to see any difference between these GeForce 7600GT cards. We have to look at the numbers to see which one offer slightly higher frame rates. While there seem to differences between the ASUS EN7600GT, Gigabyte GeForce 7600GT and MSI NX7600GT, these differences are normal variations between runs with this benchmark (1 - 4 fps) and certainly not significant at all. No surprises here, the Leadtek PX7600GT Extreme is ahead, quite obviously because of the core and memory clock advantage it has over the other three cards. The other three cards basically offer the same level of performance, the differences between them is likely normal variations between runs.

Let's look a little closer at these results. At 1024 x 768, all the cards including the GeForce 7600GS have enough pixel processing power to push this game with and without AA and AF. We do see quite a performance drop with the GeForce 7600GS when AA and AF is enabled though, a first sign of trouble perhaps? At 1280 x 1024, all the GeForce 7600GT have slightly lower minimum fps when AA and AF is enabled, including the leading Leadtek PX7600GT Extreme (thankfully it's still 10 fps or around 12 percent faster than the other GeForce 7600GT cards). At 1600 x 1200, the burden  is simply too much to bear - minimum frame rates with AA and AF are half that of without AA and AF. Clearly, the GeForce 7600GT is not meant to be run with AA and AF at resolutions higher than 1024 x 768.

A slightly higher clocked card like the Leadtek PX7600GT Extreme does offer higher frame rates overall, but with a minimum fps of 70 to 80 fps, that's not a really strong point to buy this card. For those who want to play this game at high resolutions and willing to tolerate some aliasing, any of the GeForce 7600 cards here should be enough for the job. Yes, even the GeForce 7600GS, though we have some reservations about it.  

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