Card appearance and thoughts
We've expounded the excellence of NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTX SKU for the past 3 months now but here is where the real money is at: volume-selling SKUs such as the GeForce 7600 GT are what helps the green team present a nice balance sheet.
Foxconn adds some colour to a card that's reference in design. As such, the fan isn't the quietest around, seemingly running at 100 per cent all the time, and it may annoy users who are looking for a low-noise system. There's also no concurrent memory cooling on this model, either.
Our testing indicated that the heatsink is more than capable of cooling the 7600 GT core, with idle and load temperatures of 42C and 65C, respectively.
Being a low-to-midrange SKU, the GeForce 7600 GT doesn't require auxillary power from a PEG connector: the PCIe x16 slot's is enough. As you can see, the Foxconn FV-N76TM2D2 is a single-slot card that won't impinge upon neigbouring expansion slots.
VIVO appears to be a feature of the past; very few modern cards support it. Both DVI ports are dual-link but they're not HDCP-certified, meaning that pre-recorded HD-DVD and Blu-ray material can't be played back on your PC at their native resolution. These next-generation storage formats are upon us now and with the release of Microsoft Windows Vista Home, we feel that ~£100 graphics cards should all carry the necessary HDCP compliance.
There's nothing of real interest on the back. It almost goes without saying that you can add a second GeForce 7600 GT to form a multi-GPU SLI'd setup, motherboard-permitting, of course.
