Product Reviews

In last month's What's New, ATI's Radeon X1900 series of graphics cards stormed through our performance tests, giving Nvidia's cards a thrashing. This month, it's Nvidia's turn, with its 7900 series. We looked at Leadtek's 7900 GTX Extreme and 7900 GT Extreme.

ATI's X1900 range was a complete overhaul and redesign of its existing range, but Nvidia's approach isn't so radical. The 7900 range is the same as the 7800 range, but with faster clock speeds. This has been acheived by changing the fabrication to a 90nm process, which makes the graphics chips smaller and cooler, enabling them to be clocked higher.

Leadtek has gone one step further with its cards by overclocking the reference designs. The 7900 GTX Extreme has 24 pixel pipelines, a core running at 675MHz (up from 650MHz on the reference design) and 512MB of GDDR3 RAM running at 1.66GHz (up from 1.6GHz). The 7800 GT Extreme also has 24 pixel pipelines, a core running at 520MHz (up from 450MHz on the reference design) and 256MB of GDDR3 RAM running at 1.43GHz (up from 1.32GHz).

While these speed increases mean both cards are very fast, they lag behind ATI's 48-pixel pipeline

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X1900 XT, which is the lowest model from the new range with the X1900 XTX at the top. The 7900 series only manages to outperform ATI's cards in our Doom 3 test, and that's because Nvidia's cards have better OpenGL drivers. Switch to Direct3D, which is more commonly used in games, and the ATI chips open up a clear lead. While the 7900 GTX Extreme managed 53.0fps in Splinter Cell, the X1900 XT managed 59.8fps.

Don't forget Leadtek has overclocked its cards, so the reference 7900 designs will be slightly slower. X1900 XT is also cheaper at £385 including VAT, so does this mean game over for Nvidia? We don't think so. First of all, the 7900GT Extreme is a very good card and £100 cheaper than ATI's Radeon X1900 XT. It doesn't have the same levels of performance, but any card that can pump out 27.7fps in Call of Duty 2 at a resolution of 1,600x1,200 is far from poor. In this respect, the 7900 GT is an excellent card.

While ATI may have captured the performance at the high end, its multi-card offering, CrossFire, is still not very popular. You need to buy a special master card to get it working. Nvidia's SLI, on the other hand, has been around for ages, is readily available and is much easier to use, as all Nvidia's cards are SLI-ready. This makes nVidia's graphics cards attractive to anyone with an SLI motherboard.

If you happen to have a CrossFire motherboard or are just looking for the fastest single card you can find, the X1900 XT and X1900 XTX are the cards to buy. ATI's cards are faster at high resolutions and quality settings, and they are cheaper. But those looking to spend under £300 should opt for Leadtek's 7900 GT Extreme, which is still quick enough to play all current games at a resolution of 1,600x1,200.