The GIGABYTE 7900GS is an excellent card for the money in terms of today's performance and features, outperforming the 7900GT in many instances and outperforming ATI's X1950 Pro in many instances on the performance spectrum. This makes the card an excellent choice, especially if you don't have the $500 that an 8800GTS would ask for. The market for a $200 video card far outstrips that of the $500-600 market and you get excellent performance, features of Shader Model 3.0 and an attractive game in Xpand Rally. Buying a 7900GS today is a good buy for the holiday season for those that want an upgrade from the Intel integrated graphics found on many motherboards, but unwilling to pay the hundreds of dollars an 8xxx series will entail. In any event, the GIGABYTE 7900GS TurboForce is online at Newegg for $189.99 with a $20 rebate making it competitively priced with the 7600GT cards at $135.99-159.99 on Newegg with 149.99 being the median. The extra $10-20 brings performance that far outstrips the 7600GT, making the GIGABYTE 7900GS TurboForce a winner in my book.
You might wonder why I would keep bringing the 8800GTS into the picture or even the 8800GTX when the price tag is so much more. These new cards bring a fundamental discontinuity in graphics card technology to the market. Microsoft Vista has been released to Manufacturer in the last few days, and one of the new features of Vista is Shader Model 4. The extra performance of the new cards far exceeds that of every current card on the market and warrant a serious look from every hardware enthusiast as you'll be able to play today's games with a massive amount of image quality improvement over the 79xx series and tomorrow's games that will require SM 4. The future is here and was launched this past week by NVIDIA. The next wave of games including Alan Wake, Crysis, and an update to Flight Simulator X for DirectX 10 and other upcoming games means that the move to Shader Model 4 hardware is a good choice, better in fact to upgrade the video card than upgrade the CPU in many cases. But as I said the 7900GS is a great choice for the money, and not everyone wants or is willing to shell out six big ones for a graphics card.
