Features of the XFX 7900 GS Extreme
Pricing
With a card that performs as well as the XFX 7900 GS Extreme, yet comes in at a retail price of only $219.99 before a $20 mail in rebate, price quickly becomes one of the most important features of the card. Typically the cards I review are $300 to $500 or more each, thankfully XFX and Nvidia have kept the price right where it needs to be for the vast majority of gamers to be able to buy.
SLI
Even with its low cost, the XFX 7900 GS Extreme is SLI capable for XHD gaming at up to 2560 x 1600. However, with the 7900 GS, the sweet spot for SLI gaming is on a 23" or 24" display running 1920 x 1200. SLI gaming with all the goodies turned on at 1920 x 1200 for about $400 after rebates is an excellent deal.
PureVideo with H.264 Hardware Decode
If you are looking for a moderately prices graphics card for duty in your media center system, the XFX 7900 GS Extreme is worth a look. All 7900 GS cards are capable of decoding HDCP for the newest generation protected video content. However, it is important to point out that the inclusion of the required crypto-ROM to provide HDCP encoding is optional and will not be present on all 7950 GS cards on the market. The crypto-ROM is not installed on the XFX series of 7900 GS cards.
Other Features
Other important features of the XFX 7900 GS Extreme are:
- High Dynamic Range Rendering(HDR)
- Transparency Antialiasing
- Nvidia CineFX 4.0 Engine
- Built for Windows Vista
- DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 Support
- 128-bit Studio-Precision Computation
- Nvidia Intellisample 4.0
- 90nm Process Technology
- UltraShadow II
Specs
The XFX 7900 GS Extreme is right below the 7900 GT in performance with:
- Transistors: 278M
- Core Clock: 480 MHz
- Memory Clock: 1.4 GHz
- Shaders: 7 Vertex; 20 Pixel
- ROPs: 16
- Memory Interface: 256-bit
- Frame Buffer: 256MB
- Memory Bandwidth: 42.2 GB/sec
- RAMDACs: 400 MHz
- Bus Technology: PCI Express
XFX 7900 GS Extreme in Use
Test System
The test system used for the review of the XFX 7900 GS Extreme is as follows:
- CPU: AMD FX-62
- Mainboard: ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe
- RAM: OCZ DDR2 PC2-8000 2x 1GB
- PSU: PC Power & Cooling 1KW TurboCool
- Video Card: XFX 7900 GS Extreme
- HDD: Seagate 750 GB
- Display: Eizo FlexScan S2100
Benchmarks
To benchmark the XFX 7900 GS Extreme I use the synthetic 3DMark06 test as well as some real world gaming tests with Quake 4 and FEAR. The first test series I ran was 3DMark06.
3DMark06
3DMark06 gives a nice synthetic test result that allows gamers to compare graphics cards across like platforms. The results for the XFX 7900 GS Extreme are as follows:
- Total 3DMarks: 4516
- SM 2.0 Score: 1779
- HDR/SM 3.0 Score: 1771
- CPU: 2006
- Return to Proxycon: 14.383 FPS
- Firefly Forest: 15.286 FPS
- Canyon Flight: 15.566 FPS
- Deep Freeze: 19.851
- CPU1: 0.660
- CPU 2: 1.040
Quake 4
For the next benchmark I ran the Guru3D Quake 4 benchmark loop on the XFX 7900 GS Extreme at 1024 x 768 and 1600 x 1200 on high settings, then I ran the loop again with the same resolutions but the quality set to ultra. For all test runs the AA was set at 4x and the AF was 8x and SMP was on.
- 1024 x 768, High: 139.8 FPS
- 1600 x 1200, High: 74.8 SPF
- 1024 x 768, Ultra: 113.3 FPS
- 1600 x 1200, Ultra: 62.1 FPS
FEAR
The next test up was the internal test loop for FEAR. I have said it a million times, FEAR is still one beast of a game on hardware. For the first run, I allowed FEAR to choose the default settings for the test rig and it choose:
