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The Verdict

Well I was impressed, what about you? I mean, this card literally was built the way I would have done it myself (except for the PCB color). Even the standard 7900GS offers tremendous bang for your bucks. So at default specs it already is a nice product. Now if we take this iChill version then the 7900 GS is just so much better than that default product. For slightly more money you get to have an additional 10-20% performance due to the default higher core frequency and memory clock frequency. Next to that this model is equipped with the AC cooler. Granted it's not the most sexy to look at but they most certainly do their job really well, silent and not to be forgotten, ditch heat outside the PC. Then we have the gold plated connectors, ram-sinks, quality caps and if that's not enough they throw in three years warranty and into the bundle a free racing game.

So into the finest detail we really have a lovely looking and performing graphics card.

We had no weird computer issues, lockups or anything whatsoever. And then we touched the subject of overclocking a pre-overclocked product. It was amazing. This by far has been the most tweakable GeForce 7900 GS card to date. Where all other cards halted at ~600 MHZ on the core and ~1600 on the memory we were able to push the graphics core towards 651 MHz and the memory towards 1760 MHz, I mean how cool is that? With such an overclock we see faster performance than a 300 USD/EUR 7950 GT.

Quite honestly there's absolutely nothing negative to report on this Inno3D iChill card other then the fact that it's not a DirectX 10 product. Gradually over this year Vista will slowly become more important, and thus also DirectX 10 gaming. I do however feel it'll be a long time before we actually will see a good number of DX10 games to choose from so whether that would really be an issue is something I'll leave to you.

Great performance, good quality components and a very nice bundle. For the roughly 200 EUR you need to pay for this card you'll get awesome performance and thus a great gaming experience. 

Inno3D will receive our most prestigious award: the best hardware award, for that very diverse, complete card and the balls to clock it so fast.  The GeForce 7900 GS iChill card is something you can't go wrong with given the budget range it can be found in. It's a brilliant product.

Highly recommended.

GeForce 7900 GS 256MB DDR3 iChill with pre-clock and AC cooler
Company: Inno3D
Price: 199 USD/EUR ex VAT
Info: Inno3D.com