Futuremark

While both ATI and NVIDIA are known to have fiddled with their drivers in the past to get higher Futuremark scores making the results less reliable, there is still some value to be found when looking at the results. The latest drivers from NVIDIA are verified by Futuremark for not tinkering with image quality to get higher scores, so what you see is what you get: the best quality without any tricks.

When the first 3DMark2001SE was released there was a consensus that a score of >2500 would result in playable frame rates with games released that same year. This score versus playability balance with real world games might have suffered in the next releases of 3DMark but it?s still a good guideline to get an idea of how your system (and VGA card) performs.



In 3DMark2001SE the difference between the cards is none existent, the bottle neck here is not the VGA card. 3DMark03 is more GPU dependant and here a score difference can be clearly seen, they are all high enough to ensure you that you can play older games at (super) high detail settings.



3DMark05 and 3DMark06 are more recent benchmarks from Futuremark and here we see lower scores and a larger impact of the GPU overclock. The lowest score of 3892 in 3DMark06 for the Club 3D 7900 GT which runs at reference clock speeds means that at 1280x1024 without AA/AF you will be able to play modern games without problem. Something which can not always be said from the mid-range cards like the 7600GT which scores noticeably lower at 2926.

While the Futuremark benchmarks cannot be relied on 100% to reflect real-world gameplay they are still a good starting point to evaluate performance and combined with real games can give you a decent idea what the hardware is capable of.

3DMark can also be successfully used to evaluate the effect of overclocking?


Overclocking

Each card used its own cooler, with a ambient temperature of 27?C here in the summer this will have an effect on the maximum stable overclocks. With a third party heatsink you will stand a better chance of getting higher clock speeds, although the increase over maximum clocks with the reference cooling versus the custom air cooled solutions will not be too shocking.

In the chart below you can see the percentage increase we were able to get from GPU and Memory over stock speeds.



The Club 3D is clocked at NVIDIA reference speeds to begin but had quite a bit of headroom, coming in on a tied 2nd with MSI on the maximum Core speed of 570Mhz and taking 2nd place on the memory overclock, which climbed all the way up to an impressive 900Mhz which is faster than the memory on the 7900 GTX (800Mhz).

The Sparkle only overclocked a few % although it featured the biggest cooling solution, the MSI proved to be a little better on the GPU but the memory was almost near its maximum speed.

While the factory overclock on the eVGA is quite amazing, it was even more a surprise to see how well it still overclocked past this speed, reaching 680Mhz on the core, which is 30Mhz more than the 7900 GTX! The memory also hit a high at 910Mhz, simply stunning.



3DMark2001SE is definitely bottlenecked by the CPU here, while 3DMark06 shows an impressive gain for all video cards.

Since the 7900 GT has no pipe lines cut and is basically a down-clocked GTX with less onboard memory, it?s good to see these cards pack quite an overclocking-punch. If you are an adventurous type and don?t mind to change the stock cooling and voltage modifications, you will see that the 7900 GT has a lot of potential to reach speeds well beyond GTX specifications. (Volt mod Guide , another one)

Noise&Temps

A dBA meter was placed at the side panel of the case at 20cm, the ambient noise without VGA card was ~37.5dBA. The GPU was stressed using 3DMark06 loops of the HDR tests, the maximum temperature reached was recorded. Room temperature was ~27?C.



Yes you?ve read that right, the eVGA runs at a worryingly high ~95?C, the high overclock does take its toll on the slightly larger than reference design cooler. It would be beneficiary to the VGA card?s health if a larger cooler was used to keep this overclocked card cool. The reference design of the Club 3D is sufficient to keep the card below 80?C, the MSI does better but makes slightly more noise.

In a VGA cooler roundup we did in April 2006 using a 7800 GT we ran into a problem with the fan controller on the VGA card, it simply came down to this: it didn?t work. The fan ran at 100% all the time, no matter how many times drivers were installed from scratch or how many times the system was rebooted/reset. Unfortunately it seems that this problem has not gone away with the 7900 GT, the fan controllers on three out of four cards refused to throttle the fan when in 2D mode, keeping the fan spin at 100% and resulting in the high dBA readings seen in the chart above.

The Sparkle Calibre throttled its fan speed successfully, and its heatsink was extremely efficient, keeping the GPU at 65?C and this at only a ~3dBA increase over ambient! But we might have just been lucky with the Sparkle who?s fan control did seem to work, as it appears to be a random thing, for some it works, for others it doesn?t. We recommend you do fresh Windows reinstall before you throw in the towel though as this has worked for us in the past with some of the 7800 GT cards. Not for the three 7900 GT cards in this test unfortunately.

If a fan running at 100% isn?t loud enough, it gets worse, on some cards the capacitors at rear of the cards will start to make a high pitched ?tjirping? noise when running 3D (games/applications). There are several threads on internet forums with users trying to find out what is causing this noise, here?s one over at XtremeSystems.org. No clear answer on what?s causing this is to be found.

Neither Club 3D, MSI or Sparkle made this high pitched noise, but the eVGA one did, asking eVGA about it, they said it was a small chance you?ll end with a card which makes noise like that, and you can RMA it if this noise is bothersome.

More on 7900 GT RMA and conclusive thoughts on the next page ->