Introduction

Earlier this month, NVIDIA formally introduced their first GeForce 7 GPU for the mainstream price segment: G73. The first wave of G73 chips went inside the GeForce 7600 GT; to date a number of card manufacturers have shipped GeForce 7600 GT cards including ASUS, BFG, EVGA, Gigabyte, Leadtek, MSI, PNY, and XFX. Today NVIDIA’s taking G73 to even lower price points with the announcement of the GeForce 7600 GS.

Like the GeForce 7600 GT, the GeForce 7600 GS is based on NVIDIA’s G73 GPU. If you recall, G73 is built on TSMC’s new 90-nanometer manufacturing process and functionally is a scaled down version of the G71 GPU powering the GeForce 7900 GT/GeForce 7900 GTX. We referred to it basically as half of a G71 GPU in our GeForce 7600 GT Performance Preview article, as it sports half the pixel shaders as GeForce 7900 GT (12 versus 24), half the ROPS (8 versus 16), and half the memory interface (128-bit versus 256-bit). Basically the only portion of G73 that isn’t sliced in half are the vertex shaders. NVIDIA equips G73 with five vertex units, whereas G71 has eight.

The best news of all for the GeForce 7600 GS is that NVIDIA’s made no compromises to the G73’s core architecture for GeForce 7600 GS, all the pixel and vertex shaders found in GeForce 7600 GT carry over intact, nothing’s been disabled. All NVIDIA has done is lower the clock speeds to make GeForce 7600 GS cards cheaper to produce. For instance, the GeForce 7600 GT requires high-speed GDDR3 memory running at 700MHz, whereas the GeForce 7600 GS is able to get by with cheaper 400MHz DDR2 modules.

GeForce 7600 GS reference board

The top of the reference card

Because the core architecture carries over unchanged, this gives the GeForce 7600 GS 12 pixel shaders, with five vertex units and eight ROPs, just like the GeForce 7600 GT. The GeForce 7600 GS’ G73 GPU is also still fed by two 64-bit memory controllers, for a 128-bit wide memory interface.

NVIDIA has turned down the clock speeds pretty dramatically though. Whereas the GeForce 7600 GT runs at 560MHz, the GeForce 7600 GS runs at 400MHz. On the memory side, the GeForce 7600 GS ships with 256MB of DDR2 memory running at 400MHz. In comparison, the GeForce 7600 GT’s reference specifications call for 256MB of GDDR3 memory running at 700MHz.

As a result of these changes, you’ll never mistake a stock GeForce 7600 GS for a GeForce 7600 GT in terms of 3D performance. At the same time though we’ve been told that the GeForce 7600 GS should sell for significantly less than a 7600 GT. NVIDIA expects GeForce 7600 GS boards to sell somewhere in the $129-$149 price range. In comparison, most GeForce 7600 GT cards sell online for about $189-$229 right now.

Back of the card

GeForce 7600 GS back plate

Another interesting aspect of the GeForce 7600 GS is that due to its lower clock speeds, NVIDIA’s able to cool the GPU passively – other than a relatively mundane aluminum heatsink, nothing else is required to keep the GPU cool. As you can see in the shots provided by NVIDIA of the GeForce 7600 GS reference board, the card ships without a fan. Since the GeForce 7600 GS supports all the PureVideo features found in other GeForce 7 cards, including the GeForce 7900 GT/GTX, this should be a pretty nice card for use in media center PCs. NVIDIA provides one dual-link DVI connector on the GeForce 7600 GS reference design as well, allowing the card to drive high-end flat panel displays like the Dell 3007WFP at its native screen resolution of 2560x1600. You’ll also note that the SLI connector is present on the top of NVIDIA’s reference board. This provides a dedicated path that the GPUs can use to communicate with each other, resulting in better performance than if the PCI Express interface were used.