GeForce 7 Series Round-up with Asus & MSI

Performance Summary: The trio of GeForce 7 cards in today's round-up typically outperformed the opposition from ATI, consisting of a Radeon X1900 GT and X1950 Pro.  Within its own grouping, the Asus EN7950 GT, buoyed by an extra 256MB of memory, boasted the highest overall performance, while the Asus EN7900GS TOP and MSI NX7900GT dueled it out for second place.  The results were too close to call on those two, although the overclocking results give a slight nod to the EN7900GS TOP.

ASUS EN7950GT/HTDP/512M/A

There's a lot to like about the EN7950GT - it's small, fast, and quiet.  It was the only card in our testing suite with half of a GB of memory installed on it, allowing for faster performance at higher resolutions with AA and Aniso enable.  Asus hasn't monkeyed about with the speeds on this card, but it turns out that they didn't have to, as the EN7950GT ruled throughout most of the testing.  Just because Asus hasn't raised the speeds doesn't mean you won't be able to, as we were able get nearly an additional 10% on the core and 15% on the memory.  Throw two of these together into an SLI combination, and you've got a great balance between price and performance.  Asus' EN7950GT is the best deal overall, getting the best performance at standard speeds for a price not much higher than the other GeForce cards. 

Tops in performance for this round-up 512 MB of Memory leads the pack All 7950 GTs support HDCP	Costs the most of any card in this review, albeit just slightly DX10 not supported by the 7950 GT

ASUS EN7900GS TOP/2DHT/256M/A

Asus performs a twin-killing with the EN7900GS TOP.  While technically limited compared to the 7950 GT and 7900 GT with fewer pixel and vertex shaders, Asus has overclocked the heck out of the EN7900GS TOP, adding an additional 140 MHz to the GPU alone.  In doing so, the EN7900GS TOP has to be the best option if you're in the market for a 7900 GS, or possibly even a GT.  In many of the benchmarks, the EN7900GS TOP was able to stick with or beat the 7900 GT from MSI, which also came pre-overclocked.  Throwing in Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter only sweetens the deal.  The Asus EN7900GS TOP can be had for about $260, which makes it just about the most expensive card based on the 7900 GS GPU.  However, that price increase covers the heady overclock, which does put it into 7900 GT territory.

Overclocked well above standard specs Airflow is towards outside of case rather than in Vanilla models are cheapest option out there for a GeForce 79xx Card	Missing Vertex and Pixel Shaders Not compatible with DX10 either

Which brings us to the MSI NX7900GT.  It's a great card: it's got essentially the same core as the 7950 GT, comes with an overclocked GPU and memory, and a free game to boot.  However, that game just happens to be a couple of years old, and the overall performance of the 7900 GT has been eclipsed by the cheaper EN7900GS TOP and similarly priced EN7950GT.  Additional overclocking wasn't a strong point, as we could only get some marginal speed increases.  On the bright side, this version of the NX7900GT supports HDCP, should you be using your system in conjunction with a blu-ray or other high-definition optical device.  With the passage of time typically comes the lowering in prices, and the 7900 GT models can now be had for about $240.  However, looking at the testing results, it might be better just to throw in the extra dollars and pick up the EN7900GS TOP or EN7950GT, which have better performance and gaming bundle.

HDCP Support added to the VT2D256-E-HD Model SLI Still a hot topic Price on the 7900 GT has come down a bit	Heatsink doesn't make contact with RAM Typically beaten by the "weaker" Asus EN7900GS TOP

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