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 TABLE OF CONTENTSIt's autumn... The time of new products. And they have already started to appear. But we are going to get back to the older GPUs for some time, that is GeForce 7600 GS. Today we'll examine a non-standard solution based on this processor (at last something interesting and unique). Following the tradition to equip many accelerators with noiseless coolers of its own unique design, ASUS has presented another such solution, based on the GeForce 7600 GS, with 512 MB of DDR2 memory and overclocked GPU and memory. We already reviewed an innovation product from this company some time ago, which had its memory chips and a GPU on the back side. Today we'll examine a similar product. On the whole, it should be said that the 7600 GS is very popular on the market. So it was very interesting to examine a cross between the GeForce 7600 GS and the 7600 GT (increased frequencies).
Video card
We can see that the main heatsink migrated to the back side of the PCB together with memory chips. The front side houses only a mounting element, which also acts as a small heatsink. Why move all these components to the back side? Perhaps the engineers decided that the PCB would be cooler that way, the heat from the upper heatsink going up (as there is no fan). Or maybe the reason was to design a single-slot card that wouldn't block the next slot with its cooler. But we have seen passive coolers with heat pipes, which qualify for these requirements as well. So it's difficult to explain the point of this inverted design so far. It's even strange to look at for an expert :). The card has TV-Out with a unique jack. You will need special bundled adapters to output video to a TV-set via S-Video or RCA. You can read about the TV-Out in more detail here. Unfortunately, VIVO is not available. Analog monitors with d-Sub (VGA) interface are connected with special DVI-to-d-Sub adapters. Maximum resolutions and frequencies:
As it's already clear from the above-said, the card has a unique cooling system. The cooling system is an unfolding heatsink at the back of a card on the GPU. Memory chips, operating at a lower frequency than the nominal value, do not need to be cooled. So the heatsink is not pressed into them. There are heat pipes in the back heatsink to improve heat removal.
Theoretically, the GeForce 7600 GS running at the standard frequencies can be cooled well by simpler coolers. So there is no need to overhaul the design, equip the card with an expensive unfolding heatsink. But let's not forget that the GPU frequency is raised from 400 MHz to 550 MHz, it has nearly caught up with the 7600 GT.
 
This device is nearly noiseless, but it cools well the overclocked GPU:
 up to 71°C - that's normal. Note that we ran our tests in a closed PC case with two standard fans (the air is sucked in from the front panel and is driven out at the rear), the card's heatsink was unfolded.
Bundle
Installation and DriversTestbed configuration:
VSync is disabled.
Test results: performance comparisonWe used the following test applications:
Summary performance diagramsNote that we have run two test sessions: of a single card and of the SLI mode (two accelerators).
Game tests that heavily load vertex shaders, mixed pixel shaders 1.1 and 2.0, active multitexturing.FarCry, Research
Game tests that heavily load vertex shaders, pixel shaders 2.0, active multitexturing.F.E.A.R.
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory
Call Of Duty 2 DEMO Half-Life2: ixbt01 demo
Game tests that heavily load pixel pipelines with texturing, active operations of the stencil buffer and shader unitsDOOM III High mode Chronicles of Riddick, demo 44
Synthetic tests that heavily load shader units3DMark05: MARKS 3DMark06: Shader 2.0 MARKS
 3DMark06: Shader 3.0 MARKS
You can find our comments in the conclusions.
Conclusions
ASUS EN7600GS TOP Silent (GeForce 7600 GS) 512MB PCI-E. According to our tests, this product is indeed right between the GeForce 7600 GS (standard) and the GeForce 7600 GT, though its GPU frequency is closer to the latter. That's because its memory operates at 950 MHz, while the 7600 GT has it at 1400 MHz. It plays a significant role in case of the 128-bit bus. The ASUS product actually ran against the notorious bottleneck of insufficient memory bandwidth. So its performance is somewhere in the middle. When the GPU load is heavier, its performance results are closer to the GeForce 7600 GT. The new card fairs very well against the X1650 PRO, but its price will play a major role. Don't forget that ATI drops prices for the 1650 PRO to $100. On the whole, the card produces a very nice impression of a quiet Mid-End model that does not grow very hot (that's true for the current state of affairs, of course - when such Mid-End products easily outperform former Hi-End representatives like the 6800 GT and even the 6800 Ultra).
You can find more detailed comparisons of various video cards in our 3Digest.
ATI RADEON X1300-1600-1800-1900 ReferenceNVIDIA GeForce 7300-7600-7800-7900 Reference
We express our thanks to
ASUSTeK Russia for the provided video card ASUS EN7600GS TOP Silent (GeForce 7600 GS) 512MB PCI-E
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