After benching the 7300GT I had hoped to bench the 7600GT but the 80nm XFX 7600GT at 700Mhz gpu and 1.1ns memory only seemed to be a limited trial run and their latest card seems to be a passively cooled Fatal1ty job which I will not buy on Pr1nciple . So in the meantime, and waiting for 8300GT to come out I decided to bench the mighty nvidia 7300GS.

The advantages of this card is it is a) very cheap and b) puts the emphasis on the card not the cpu, even in 2001. This thing has a whole 4 pipelines straining at the leash .

Even though it just has 4 such is the power of the modern gpu that it can still easily become bandwidth limited on the memory front and so this is the main thing to aim towards before picking the card. A bit of time and effort spent on the selection of the card will make getting those highly desired 7300GS #1's in all 4 3dmarks a damn sight easier. Ignore the gpu just make sure the memory is above the norm. You can forget GDDR3 at this level but some nice smokin Samsung DDR2 will be just what the doctor ordered.

Luckily for me I have years and years of bottom feeding video cards so have an uncanny ability to sniff out the best uns . At this level the manufacturers do not often put up the memory speed but you can have other clues, for instance most cards at this level are half height cards as the PCB is cheaper. That's a no no But check out this beauty I found

http://www.komplett.co.uk/k/ki.asp?sku=317788

Full height card, pretty good heatsink for something so cheap and those memory chips look fast even at 110x90 pixels !

Bought two. They came in the post two days later.

At this point cue the violins and get your hanky out as the story takes a heart rendering turn for the worst

I should have checked the website out.

http://www.pointofview-online.com/de...content_id=135

Yep its a flippin half height card. Even worse the memory is rated at 3.7ns which is 270Mhz or 540Mhz effective ..it's not even Samsung, it's CCL or CCI or CC1 or something I have never heard of. Years of bottom feeding video cards and I am still f*cking it up ..will I never learn ?

:

The one good thing is that there is nothing in the world that a good beer cannot fix and so as the first can popped I contemplated the task ahead......

To be continued.

Regards
Andy