Page 2

Galaxy GeForce 7600 GS up-close and personal ..

Armed with the development codename G73, the 7600 GS chip was made on the newer 90nm fabrication process. For a mid-range product it has a rather large transistor count, no less than 177 million transistors can be found on both the GeForce 7600 GS and GT silicon.

You might ask .. what's different on this Galaxy card compared to the regular GeForce 7600 GS and GT then ?

It's a valid question and we'll answer it. Get this, 12 pixel pipelines running at a 500 MHz frequency (Default GS is at 400 MHz, GT is pushing 540 MHz) with five active vertex processors. Again the product has eight ROPs. The memory however is still 128-bit whereas I hoped it would have been boosted to 256-bit. But it's really fast clocked 1.2ns DDR3 memory namely 1400 MHz (2x700) which is similar to the GT and and way less than the standard GS series have. That is looking to be quite okay in my eyes. Judging from the specifications this product should be able to compete with the middle segment of current mid-range graphics cards such as the GeForce 6800 GT/7600GT.

$ffffffffff Display adapter information
$ffffffffff ----------------------------------------------------------------
$0000000000 Description : NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS
$0000000001 Vendor ID : 10de (NVIDIA)
$0000000002 Device ID : 0392
$0000000003 Location : bus 5, device 0, function 0
$0000000004 Bus type : PCIE
$000000000f PCIE link width : 16x supported, 16x selected
$ffffffffff ----------------------------------------------------------------
$ffffffffff NVIDIA specific display adapter information
$ffffffffff ----------------------------------------------------------------
$0100000000 Graphics core : NV4B/G73 revision A2 (12pp,5vp)$0100000001 Hardwired ID : 0391 (ROM strapped to 0392)
$0100000002 Memory bus : 128-bit
$0100000003 Memory type : DDR2 (RAM configuration 03)
$0100000004 Memory amount : 262144KB
$0100000100 Core clock domain 0 : 504.000MHz
$0100000101 Core clock domain 1 : 504.000MHz
$0100000102 Core clock domain 2 : 504.000MHz
$0100000006 Memory clock : 711.000MHz (1422.000MHz effective)
$0100000007 Reference clock : 27.000MHz

The card is targeted at a very wide audience with a sales price of 150-170 USD, which is just an excellent price considering the product even comes with a Zalman cooler for an inaudible experience, I expect prices to fall even further though. This product is a 256MB version as mid-range is now moving on to that amount of memory

Just like the 7600 GT; the 7600 GS has SLI support also. And since it's a Series 7 product you can expect dual-link DVI for extremely high resolution gaming up-to 2560x1600 (XHD as the industry would love to call that = Extreme High Definition) and all the sweetness in the form of HDR support and that finally important Shader Model 3.

Allow me to place everything in a chart to understand the technology behind the 7600 GS a tad better:

Please focus on the chart below where I cite the more important specifications. Highlighted in blue you'll notice the Galaxy products specs.

GeForce 6800 Ultra

16

6

256-bit

GDDR3/256MB

400MHz

1100MHz

GeForce 6800 GT

16

6

256-bit

GDDR3/256MB

350MHz

1000MHz

GeForce 6800

12

5

256-bit

GDDR/128MB

325MHz

700MHz

GeForce 6800 LE

8

4

256-bit

GDDR/128MB

320MHz

700MHz

As you can see Galaxy did some remarkable stuff with this GS, it has much faster clocks on both memory and core which brings the product VERY close to the 50 bucks more expensive 7600 GT.