XFX 7600GS XT SLI Video Card Review :: Conclusion

There is a market for the $600 video card, and there are people that are willing to shell out that much for a video card. Most people looking for a video card today, however, are looking for a card under $200. I remember a time when the high-end video card would cost at most $200, and kind of miss those days. Today's video card market is stuck on "Faster, Hotter, more room (4 slots?), and more power". As a reviewer it's a bit sad to see the x1900XTX running 60C on IDLE, or the need for 4 slots for SLIed 7900GTXs or CrossFired X1900XTXs, its just gone insane.

The XFX 7600GS is a good example of what kind of performance you can expect from a mainstream video card today. And it's a good one. The card is on Newegg today for a price of $143, putting it squarely against a X1600XT in price category. XFX has overclocked their card to a very nice 500MHz; just 50MHz slower than the 7600GT and 100MHz faster than NVIDIA's reference clock. Performance was faster than the ATI card and short of a 7600GT in most cases with F.E.A.R. being the exception.

The card played games well at the moderate resolution of 1024x768 and 1280x1024 without AA and no Anisotropic Filtering. If you want those features I would suggest a 7900GT or a X1900XT card, as they'll play any game available today with those settings. SLI mode allows you to play much like a 7900GT would and allows you to turn on the AA and AF features.

With the release of Microsoft Vista pushed back into 2007 for retail release, the plans of NVIDIA and ATI for the rest of the year will be interesting. Will they release a card that supports Direct3D10 without an API to support it? The advent of Unified Shaders and geometry shading will have to wait, but for now, games like Oblivion are released, requiring a lot of power to run at maximum resolution and settings. Two cards are better than one, and two 7600GSs are excellent examples of how SLI can transform a system with one video card into one that plays the most demanding games for a modest increase in price. In this case two 7600GSs from XFX are equivalent in performance in some cases to a 7900GT, not bad for the $300 you would spend on two of these cards. Overall the 7600GS XT Edition cards are a good introduction card for the gamer on a budget as they offer a good performance versus price trade off.