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Literally hot on the heels of Wednesday's review of the BFG GeForce 7600 GT OC, we have a third (and final) addition to the BFG line-up. Today's focus is on the BFG GeForce 7900 GT OC, a middle-high-end part that is just one performance notch below the flagship NVIDIA part of the modern day, but several notches below on the price scale.
At an NVIDIA MSRP of $449, the GeForce 7900 GT is being targeted at the high-end gamer that is still on a budget, albeit a much more flexible one than the 7600 GT is meant for. It replaces the short-lived GeForce 7800 GT in the NVIDIA line-up, and promises to deliver better performance, at the same price, and at a lower power consumption with its updated G71 GPU. We covered the details behind the G71 in our GeForce 7900 GTX launch article, and we found it to be an efficient, snappy piece of engineering. That piece of engineering is now being offered at a greatly more accessible price.
By now, BFG Technologies' "OC" series needs no introduction. Striving to appeal to the enthusiast gamer, BFG's "OC" series denotes video cards that are overclocked out-of-the-box but retain BFG's lifetime warranty -- and available at the same price as competing, stock-clocked products. I'm a sucker for bang-for-the-buck deals, and the "OC" series is a good way of achieving that. What shocks me this time around, however, is that BFG's GeForce 7900 GT OC -- the very same one that we are reviewing today -- can be had for a bargain-basement price of $329 at Newegg at the time of this writing. That's $120 less than the MSRP. If I were wearing boots I'd be shaking in them.
Just what can you expect from BFG's GeForce 7900 GT OC? Let's take a look at the raw specifications:
| X1800 XT | 7800 GT | 7900 GT | 7900 GTX | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Architecture | R520 | G70 | G71 | G71 |
| Manufacturing Process | 90 nm | 110 nm | 90 nm | 90 nm |
| Transistor Count | 321M | 300M | 278M | 278M |
| Texture Units | 16 | 20 | 24 | 24 |
| Pixel Shader Units | 16 | 16 | 16 | 16 |
| Vertex Shader Units | 8 | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| Core Clock (MHz) | 625 | 400 | 450 (475) | 650 |
| Fillrate (Gigapixels) | 10 | 6.4 | 7.2 | 10.4 |
| Memory Clock (MHz) | 750 | 500 | 650 (680) | 800 |
| Memory Interface | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth (GB/s) | 48.0 | 32.0 | 41.6 | 51.2 |
| Memory Size (MB) | 256/512 | 256 | 256 | 256 |
NVIDIA's reference 7900 GT specifications are a very healthy bump over the 7800 GT that it is replacing. The 150 MHz bump in memory clock speed nets an almost 10 GB/s improvement in memory bandwidth, which I think is great -- but what's even greater is BFG's healthy clock speed bumps over the stock clocks (the number in brackets)! Another interesting change in beat is that the GT variant no longer cuts down on any rasterizer units when compared to the GTX variant. The 7800 GTX contained 24 texture units, while the 7800 GT cut that down to 20 -- but no longer! The 7900 GT now has just as many texture units as the 7900 GTX -- 24 to be precise.
All that is separating the 7900 GT from the 7900 GTX now is purely core and memory clock speed. I can hear the overclockers out there breathing faster already. So without further ado, let's take a closer look at BFG's GeForce 7900 GT OC!
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