BFG 7600 GT OC and ATI X1800GTO

Value:

Most of the GeForce 7600 GT's seem to be priced around the £150 mark, with some coming in as low as £140 too. We found BFG Tech's GeForce 7600 GT OC in stock and ready to buy on both Overclockers UK and on Dabs. Overclockers UK has managed to get its price almost £20 lower than Dabs, and are selling the card at £152.69 including VAT. This compares to Dabs' rather expensive £168.92 asking price for the same product.

ATI's Radeon X1800GTO is not available at the moment, but ATI has told us that they will be available over the next week or so. We're expecting the cards to be priced around the £170 mark when they do come into stock, based on the suggested US retail price of $249. Hopefully these prices will hold true when we see retail availability.

We found HIS' Radeon X850XT available for just under £150 including VAT on Ebuyer. Finally, we found Leadtek's PX6800 GS Extreme in stock on Ebuyer for £152.98 including VAT. The cards have come down in price since their launch - the HIS Radeon X850XT once cost over £300 inc VAT, while the Leadtek PX6800 GS Extreme was priced around the £170 mark when it first launched.

The Radeon X1800GTO seems to be priced out of the market a little at £170, because you're able to buy something like a BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GT for around £200. Also (they're not in stock until the 30th but...) XFX's standard GeForce 7900 GT card is selling on Lowest for £199 including VAT. That's a damn good price for a GeForce 7900-series card that performs as well as a GeForce 7800 GTX 256 and they seem to be overclocking pretty well based on our initial experiences with several retail partner cards - expect a roundup of GeForce 7900 GT's soon.

The BFG 7600 GT OC hits £150 and clearly beats out the performance of the GeForce 6800 GS and Radeon X850XT cards in that price range. At £170, the ATI Radeon X1800GTO appears to be straying a little close to the £200-gets-a-7800 GT mark.

Rounding things up:

BFG Tech GeForce 7600 GT OC: The gaming experience delivered by BFG Tech's GeForce 7600 GT OC left us somewhat surprised and lost for words. The price of this card is quite fantastic and it will give you a better gaming experience than a GeForce 6800 GT, and also a heavily overclocked GeForce 6800 GS pretty much across the board. You get all of this performance for a mere £150, which represents damn good value for money.

Our only real concern with the card is the noise emitted by the small and whiney cooling solution. Hopefully, we'll see board partners moving away from the standard cooler over the next few months, because that seems to be the only problem with this part at the moment - it could be a little quieter during heavy gaming sessions. However, the good thing is that the pitch is consistent and the fan doesn't continually spin up and down.

We covered image quality in our GeForce 7900 GTX roundup and we don't think that it's quite as important as it is at the high end. People spending upwards of £300 on a video card are looking for the best gaming experience and the best image quality available - this is why we forced the driver quality to high quality with those cards. However, the mid range is all about gaining a decent gaming experience while maintaining image quality that is more than acceptable.

In this case, NVIDIA's image quality is acceptable and the only game where we felt that we needed to increase the quality was Battlefield 2 - which has been an achilles heel for NVIDIA due to the age-old shimmering issue that has been around since the launch of GeForce 7-series.

ATI Radeon X1800GTO: There are a number of problems with the Radeon X1800GTO that aren't strictly related to the cards' performance, because that is pretty good in general terms. However, if the card is going to be priced at £170-180, you're getting into a league where the card is almost competing with the GeForce 7900 GT. Even at £160, the card doesn't really break any boundaries in performance, despite trading blows with the BFG Tech GeForce 7600 GT OC.

We're not sure whether retail cards will be capable of being soft modded to allow all sixteen pipelines to be used to give a higher gaming performance. We'll cover that when we get retail cards in-house for testing. If they do unlock, it could represent a good buy, but you'll also need to factor in a change of cooling solution too.

The cooling solution is our biggest problem with the Radeon X1800GTO because it's simply not up to our expectations. We moaned about the loud, inconsistent and generally poor cooling solution when we reviewed the Sapphire Radeon X1800XL - things haven't changed since then. The cooler still spins up whenever it feels like it before spinning down again.

The sheer size of the chip means that the cooling solution choice is limited due to the amount of heat R520 emits, even with one of the four pixel shader quads disabled. The constant change of pitch during heavy gaming was simply too distracting and there were times when we wanted to do nothing other than jam a pen into the fan to allow us to concentrate on gaming.

Final Thoughts...

The contest between the GeForce 7600 GT and the Radeon X1800GTO is a close one where performance is concerned. The reference clocked GeForce 7600 GT is slightly slower than the Radeon X1800GTO, but BFG Tech's 7600 GT OC is fast enough to give it a slight performance edge. Ultimately when performance is so close, the decision comes down to price and other considerations.

The cooling solutions on both cards is far from ideal, but the cooler on the BFG Tech GeForce 7600 GT OC doesn't consistently spin up and down during heavy load. This is something that the cooling solution on the Radeon X1800GTO does do and we were left a little underwhelmed by the card, especially considering the noise it was making.

Our feelings about the Radeon X1800GTO would change somewhat if the price was more competitive and the cooler was considerably better. For now though, the GeForce 7600 GT gets our recommendation in the mid range. BFG Tech's card is slightly overclocked (albeit by not that much), which does provide a slightly better gaming experience than the reference card. If you've got a GeForce 6600 GT and are looking for something a bit faster, this card should provide you with a whole new level of gaming performance.