XFX GeForce 7600 GT Fatal1ty 256MiB appearance
The third passively-cooled graphics card is courtesy of XFX. That knowledge is enough for us to glean that it's an NVIDIA-based board, so let's take a closer look at the XFX GeForce 7600 GT Fatal1ty Edition.Mr. Wendell, aka Fatal1ty, has made quite a name for himself as an elite gamer. So much so that he has an enviable list of lucrative sponsorships that bear his name.
XFX has teamed up with the FPS maestro and designed two passively-cooled GeForce 7600 GT cards that proudly bear the Fatal1ty logo.
NVIDIA's midrange and low-end 8-series GPUs have been announced and are currently available, but the GeForce 7600 GT still continues to sell in droves, so, we suppose, it makes good sense for XFX to expand its line-up to include a super-clocked 7600 GT.
The two Fatal1ty models are differentiated on the basis of clock speeds alone; both use identical cooling. The wonderfully named PV-T73G-U1F4 operates at default GeForce 7600 GT frequencies of 560MHz core and 1400MHz memory. The review model, PV-T73G-U1D4, features a speedbinned core that operates at 650MHz and faster GDDR3 memory that chugs along at 1600MHz, so quite a performance gain in both respects.
The cooling, dubbed Silent But Deadly, is more akin to the Sapphire X1650 Pro's, with a small-ish heatsink on the front that's connected to an L-shaped finned area by way of two heatpipes.
It also works well enough; with an ambient temperature of 18.5°C our sample idled at 42°C and ran at just 56°C under full load.
Aesthetically-speaking, the XFX Fatal1ty card is the best looking of the trio, and fits in well with XFX's usually slick presentation.
Whilst the heatsink is not quite as thick as the Sapphire X1650 Pro's it will still take up part of the adjacent space next to whichever PCIe x16 slot you position it in. That's one of the main pitfalls of passive design.
Both DVI ports are dual-link-capable, which is good, but neither support HDCP, which is bad. XFX would have to tinker with the design and specifically add an HDCP ASIC to a GPU that was architected well before high-definition playback protection became a pervasive issue.
Space permitting, you can add a second card to form an SLI setup.
Summary
A heavily overclocked GeForce 7600 GT that's also the beneficiary of some tasty-looking passive treatment. The XFX Fatal1ty Edition is the most expensive on test, weighing in at around £87, but it should provide the best performance.None of the cards support video-in, but that's generally true for most sub-£100 cards, anyway.
