Leadtek PX7600GT TDH
- — 18 May, 2006 07:00
Leadtek's new mid-range graphics card is based on NVIDIA's 7600GT processor, which has a clock speed of 560MHz, a memory speed of 1.4GHz and it can process 12 pixels per clock cycle. The processor is built using NVIDIA's 90nm fabrication process, which means the chip is physically smaller than the company's previous 130nm chips and should not produce as much heat. It has a standard heat sink and a small cooling fan, which in our tests proved to be quite noisy.
The card has 256MB 128-bit of GDDR3 memory and can be used in SLI configurations with other 7600GT cards. It provides excellent frame rates for the current crop of games: approximately double the frames per second (fps) provided by cards based on NVIDIA's previous mid-range chip, the 6600GT.
In fact, the single PX7600GT that we tested proved to be faster than two 6600GT cards running in SLI mode during Quake 4 testing. At a resolution of 1280x1024, with 4x anti-aliasing (AA) and with image quality settings set to ultra, the 7600GT managed 37fps. As a comparison, a single 6600GT-based card managed 18fps and a 6600GT SLI configuration managed 32fps. Without AA, the same test garnered 64fps for the 7600GT, 31fps for the 6600GT and 53fps for the 6600GT SLI setup.
The card has support for Pixel Shader Model 3.0, a technology which provides more efficient processing of textures. This card also has support for high dynamic-range rendering (HDR). Unlike cards based on the latest mid-range Radeon chips, and depending on the type of implementation of HDR, this card may not be able to perform AA while simultaneously processing an HDR scene. This may give the Radeon-based cards an edge in image quality when displaying these types of scenes.
