eVGA e-GeForce 7900GS KO

Throughout all of our benchmarks regardless of what we are reviewing, testing is done in a clean and stand-alone version of Windows XP Professional with SP2. No Windows Updates are applied for the sake of efficiency, unless one is required for a piece of hardware on the computer. Prior to testing, these conditions are met:

• Desktop and scrap files are cleaned up, including emptying of recycle bin.
• No virus scanner or firewall is installed in the stand-alone installation.
• The stand-alone installation drive is completely defragged using Diskeeper 2007 Professional.
• All unnecessary programs are closed, so that Windows should have no more than 15 active processes running.
• Computer has proper airflow.

Below is the setup we used during testing.

• CPU: Intel E6600 (2.4GHz)
• Motherboard: ASUS P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP
• Memory: OCZ 2GB NVIDIA PC2-7200 (DDR2-800, 4-4-4-12-2T)
• Video: eVGA 7900 GS 256MB (NVIDIA Driver 94.24)
Compared Cards
• ASUS 7900GT 256MB
• Sound: Onboard HD Audio
• Storage: Seagate 7200.9 320GB
• Etcetera: Windows XP Professional SP2
• Cooling: Corsair Nautilus 500

To gather results, each game is manually played through the same level each time, which takes between 3 – 5 minutes normally. All results are gathered with the help of FRAPS 2.82.

For Half-Life 2: Episode 1, I chose my favorite level, ep1_c17_02a. The level starts you off in a dimly lit hallway and you need to make it through to the roof where an airship is trying to gun you down. It’s a fun level, and really shows off HDR.

The GS card was slower than the GT, but still performed quite well. 66 FPS at 1600×1200 is a comfortable result.

The level chosen for SupCom was the Finn’s Revenge skirmish mission. The entire playthrough lasted five minutes and consisted of building up a small base and also deploying a few ships.

SupCom is a game that really, really likes extra GPU power. Even when the action was low, we were lucky to score more than 20FPS at 1600×1200. The GT card had an obvious advantage here.