Introduction
Give the NVIDIA GeForce 7300 product line a shufti and you'll see a 4-wide group of base SKUs that fill pretty much the bottom rung of the company's PCI Express performance ladder. Yes, GeForce 7100 exists and yes, you can still find GeForce 6-series PCI Express boards around, but with a starting price of less than £30 all in (seriously), GeForce 7300 in all its 90nm glory is what you'd realistically choose these days from NV if you're on a penny pincher.The thing is, that 4-wide standard set of reference SKUs on the linked NVIDIA page is adhered to by NVIDIA AIB partners as much as ice cubes to polytetrafluoroethylene. We'll concentrate on just GeForce 7300 GT for the purposes of this piece, if that's cool. You see we've reviewed GeForce 7300 GT before, but the Galaxy example, complete with GDDR3 memories and a 500MHz core clock, wasn't really a 7300 GT as NVIDIA sets out. Whoops or yay, it depends where you stand on the gazillion graphics products per segment thing that's happening these days.
And the same happens in the other direction, AIB partners downclocking or doing other performance degrading things but retaining the SKU name. Err? This review will illustrate the point quite nicely as we take a look at two GeForce 7300 GTs from XFX and eVGA. Read on, Macduff[*].
[*] Sorry, Shakey!
