GIGABYTE is one of the Tier-1 motherboard manufacturers based in Taiwan. Along with ASUS, universal abit and ECS, GIGABYTE provides the vast majority of motherboards on the market today from Taiwan. GIGABYTE also manufactures video cards. GIGABYTE is one of the companies that manufacture video cards from both AMD (ATI) and NVIDIA, giving the widest possible range of products at all price points for the video card market.'
NVIDIA was founded in 1993 and today is the largest independent supplier of add-on graphics cards in the world. With revenue exceeding $2 billion a year, NVIDIA has diversified itself and is a far cry from the company that failed with the NV2 chipset from early in their history, or the GeForce 5xxx series of cards from as recently as 2003. 2004 saw a resurgence of NVIDIA to where they have always been, at the top of the performance chain, the top of the feature chain, and brought NVIDIA back to respectability with the GeForce 6800 series.
The 6800 series was NVIDIA's first generation Shader Model 3.0 architecture based upon what they codenamed NV40. The 6800, the 6600 and the 6200 series formed a high-medium-low mix that served NVIDIA well until 2005 when they launched their second SM 3.0 architecture, the 7xxx series. The high end of the 7xxx series consisted of the 7800GTX, the 7800GT, the 7900GTX, the 7900GT, the 7950GT and the 7950GX2 Dual card. The mid-range was represented by the 7600GT, and 7600GS. The mainstream/low-end is represented by the 7300GT. The card on the review bench today is the GIGABYTE 7600GS HDMI card.
