Galaxy GeForce 7300 GT with GDDR3

Overclocking

We overclocked the Galaxy card using RivaTuner - we couldn't get the CoolBits registry hack to work with the latest version of Forceware at the time this review was completed. This should give an indication of how well this video card overclocks, but please bear in mind that your own mileage may vary. We cannot guarantee that manufacturers aren't sending us samples that overclock particularly well.

The stock frequencies of the card (which comes pre-overclocked) are 500/1400MHz, and we were able to overclock the card to 605/1610MHz before we started to encouter problems with stability. This is a pretty good run - an increase of 21% on the core and 15% on the memory.

Value

Overclockers UK is selling the Galaxy card for around £82 inc VAT, which is a pretty good price. It runs up against the X1600 XT in our tests - our nice HIS card with IceQ cooler costs around £85 inc VAT. The cards performed pretty similarly in our tests, so even though the 7300 is 'technically' a run below the X1600, the performance is clearly matched. We really like the Zalman heatsink on the Galaxy card, which we think is worth paying for. If you can stretch an extra tenner, you could grab a 3DFuzion GeForce 7600 GT for £94, but that doesn't have as nice a cooler. You will get a nice increase in performance, though.

Final thoughts...

The GeForce 7300 is a solid product at the low-end, and Galaxy have gone to a lot of effort to turbo-charge it and eek every last amount of performance out of it. The clocks are unbelievable speeds, bringing the performance right up to the cusp of the chip bracket above it. The cooler is a really nice touch, and facilitates a decent amount of overclocking. It's fantastically quiet, which will be a boon to anyone who likes to keep their system somewhere within earshot.

The card offered a gaming experience in some cases better, in some cases worse than an ATI competitor, the Radeon X1600XT. It will deliver a reasonably good gaming experience on a 1280x1024 LCD panel, and will enable gamers to get onboard mainstream games like World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike: Source with the minimum of hassles and the minimum financial cost.

On the whole, we really like the card - although we can't help feeling that, given that it's only £10 cheaper than a considerably faster GeForce 7600 GT, it's hard not to recommend the card in the price level slightly above. That is, unless the cooling solution is really important to you.