Thoughts, HEXUS.awards, HEXUS.where2buy, HEXUS.right2reply
We reckon that NVIDIA's GeForce 7900GS GPU remains a strong contender at around the £100 mark. The architecture is impressive for a low-to-midrange card and the benchmarks show just how much faster it is than a GeForce 7600GT, priced at only £20 or so less for a reference model. The 7900GS needs to be good, because AMD's Radeon X1950, available from around £115, is hewn from high-end SKUs, too.
Inno3D, then, chose a good SKU to base one of its iChiLL series around. It's taken the reference design, thrown it into the bin, and started a-fresh. Cooling has been upgraded via the use of a quieter pre-fitted Arctic Cooling NV Silencer 6 and GPU/memory clocks raised from 450/1320 to 550/1550. What's more, Inno3D has invested in higher-quality capacitors and harder-wearing gold-plated ports.
The bundle is also good, which includes a full gaming title and the 3-year warranty is better than the industry average, even if it is fully reliant on the quality of the vendor's customer service.
Topping it all off, the retail price of around £110 is consistent with default-clocked models from most other manufacturers, making Inno3D's iChiLL 7900GS that much more appealing.
Our gripes start and finish with the lack of HDCP support on this SKU. Other than that, the Inno3D iChiLL 7900GS Arctic Cooling Silencer 6 offers a near-perfect bunch of enthusiast-oriented features at an excellent price and it's available right now. Recommended at £110.
HEXUS Awards
Inno3D iChiLL 7900GS Arctic Cooling Silencer 6
HEXUS Where2Buy
The Inno3D iChiLL 7900GS Arctic Cooling Silencer 6 is currently available to buy for around £110.HEXUS Right2Reply
At HEXUS.net, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any of Inno3D's representatives choose to do so, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.Additional reading
Sapphire X1950 Pro 256MiBXFX GeForce 7900GS Extreme Edition & Inno3D GeForce 7900GS Zalman Edition
HIS X1650 XT IceQ Turbo Dual DL-DVI 256MiB
ASUS EAX1650XT 256MiB (X1650 XT Single Card, and CrossFire)
Sapphire X1950 Pro ULTIMATE 256MiB
Foxconn GeForce 7600GT 256MiB
CrossFire and SLI dongle-less / bridgeless performance analysis
NVIDIA GeForce 7950GT
