EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GT CO Superclocked Review - Page 4 of 5
Review By Steve Angelly - March 9, 2006
Possible 4-Pin Set for Audio Connection?
Of possible interest to some is the absence of the 4-pin lead set for an
audio jack, possibly for HDMI connectivity. This was reported to have been
noticed on a engineering design sample. Such a 4-pin connection is absent on
this card though if you look close you will see a place for it on the PCB. Maybe
this missing connection will show up later and the purpose revealed although
this is just speculation.
6-Pin PCI-E Power Connector
The PCI-E power connection is positioned on the card the same
as the 7800-series. NVIDIA recommends a 300-350W (20-23A on 12V), or higher,
power supply for a single 7900 GT. For two 7900 GT-based graphics cards running
in SLI configuration, a minimum 450W system power supply (with 12V rating of
26A) is recommended.
SYNTHETIC BENCHMARK RESULTS
The synthetic benchmark suite for this preview consists of Aquamark3,
Futuremark's 3DMark2005 and 3DMark2006. All tests were performed at a resolution
of 1280x1024 with application of antialiasing and ansiotropic filtering as
identified.
AquaMark3
As I have mentioned before I used this benchmark mainly for testing stability in
overclocking graphic card ram but in general AM3 provides very good stress tests
of system components. The slightest hint of sprites in a frame is a good
indicator of instability of ram timings and the need to back off on the
overclock. Any artifacts usually indicates too much of an overclock on the CPU
or GPU. Of course, there are other factors to consider but in general these are
basic indicators of initially what to look for if problem solving is required.
AquaMark3 Benchmark Test Results
Results were a 'dead heat' with no antialiasing applied but when 4x
antialiasing with 8x ansiotropic filtering was applied the 7900 GT CO edged out
the 7800 GTX.
3DMark2005 Benchmark Test Results
3DMark2005
Game tests consist of GT1: Return to Proxycon, GT2: Firefly Forest, and GT3:
Canyon Flight. 3DMark05 requires DirectX 9 compatible graphics hardware with
support for Pixel Shader 2.0 and higher. Resolution of 1280x1024 was used for
all testing. Application of antialiasing and ansiotropic filtering used are as
identified in table below.
The 7900 GT CO convincingly out-performed the 7800 GTX in this benchmark. The
difference was 17% with no AA/4xAF and better than 18% with 4xAA/8xAF in favor
of the GT.
3DMark2006
Overall scores were obtained running the benchmark using a resolution of
1280x1024 with no antialiasing and a mixture of bilinear and trilinear texture
filtering. Performance was broken down to two main categories consisting of SM
2.0 and HDR/SM 3.0 with two subcategories each. The subcategories of SM 2.0 list
the performance results frames per second (FPS) for GT1: Return to Proxycon and
GT2: Firefly Forest. The second subcategory, HDR/SM 3.0, lists the results for
HDR1: Canyon Flight and HDR2: Deep Freeze. CPU results were not recorded.
3DMark2006 Benchmark Test Results
Again, the 7900 GT CO SUPERCLOCKED bested the 7800 GTX.
