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Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory provides some insight into what kind of future lies ahead. Like F.E.A.R, this game is a little bit heavy on shaders. Here we can see the higher clocked cards retain a 10 percent higher frame rates, but that advantage is not enough to push 1600 x 1200 with AA and AF. You can still play at 1600 x 1200 if you want, but it would be wise to at least turned off AA if you do.

Conclusion:

The GeForce 7900GTs are, in a sense, comparable replacement of the GeForce 7800GTX so it's no surprise the optimal resolution is 1280 x 1024 or 1280 x 960. Higher clocked cards such as the ASUS EN7900GT TOP, Leadtek PX7900GT Extreme and Gigabyte GeForce 7900GT TurboForce do offer a 10 percent performance advantage over the reference clocked cards such as the MSI NX7900GT. And just like what we saw with the higher clocked GeForce 7800GTX, the higher clocked GeForce 7900GT cards retained that lead at 1600 x 1200, offering just enough frame rates in some cases for comfortable gameplay. Unlike our last GeForce 7600GT round up, the increase is more evenly spread between minimum and maximum fps. No doubt the use of the 256 bit memory bus helped here.

If you're only going to play at 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 1024 or 1280 x 960, the MSI NX7900GT has more bang for the buck, particularly if you're a budget conscious gamer and more appreciative of the video input capabilities of the card,. This card becomes more appealing once you factored in SLI and its physics acceleration potential. Not only do you get a 2nd graphics card, you also get a capture card and a physics accelerator in one convenient package. However, pure performance aficionados will be advised to take a good look at the Gigabyte GeForce 7900GT TurboForce - it's slightly cheaper than the other higher clocked cards with similar performance. One minus point we can think of with this card is it's dual slot cooling solution. It's not a good idea to squeeze in two of them into an SLI setup if the space between your PCI-E x16 slots is not wide enough. Of course if asynchronous physics acceleration becomes a reality, you can always 'sacrifice' 2 PCI slots and put it in the second PCI-E x16 slot. The Leadtek PX7900GT Extreme is also worth mentioning - it comes with slightly lower noise levels, no doubt due to it's lower fan operating speed. At the same time, it's still able to maintain similar heat levels at full load. The major good news for users everywhere is that these higher clocked cards do not have the problem early, higher clocked GeForce 7900GTs have - defective cores most likely caused by clocking the card beyond the safety margin set by NVIDIA.

In conclusion, we recommend the Gigabyte 7900GT TurboForce, Leadtek PX7900GT Extreme and MSI NX7900GT. These cards have enough differentiating factor, each with different appeal - price, low noise levels and video input features. However, do remember each of them have some drawbacks as well, so there's no clear cut winners in this round up.

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