gamer11200

Back in March of this year, i purchased the EVGA GeForce 7600GT SSC 512MB AGP 8X video card to replace my aging Sapphire Radeon 9600XT 256MB Atlantis Video card. Upon installing the EVGA card, i noticed 3 things:
1. 7600GT has a cooling fan on it
2. It requires a 4-pin power cable to power it.
3. It requires a 350+ Watt Power Supply

No worries however, as I have a spare hard drive cable (E-VGA packaged a Hard drive power splitter cable that gives you 2 on one end for 1 just in case you need it), and I also have a 430 watt ThermalTake power supply.

At first, I had some problems playing OpenGL games (Doom 3 and Prey), but that was quickly resolved with a system restore. I installed the new Nvidia drivers the first time, the second time, I installed the drivers that came with the card.

Here are some of my test results using FRAPS

Name of game (1024x768x32 resolution) - fps with Radeon 9600XT - fps with GeForce 7600GT
Doom 3 - 32 - 60
Prey - 21 - 56
Battlefield 2142 - 19 - 26
Unreal Tournament 3 - 25 - 44

The biggest gainer was Prey, earning almost 3x the FPS. The smallest gainer was EA's Battlefield 2142 which boasted a small increase, but made it playable. Now, all of my games are actually playable! I was truly impressed with Unreal Tournament 3 as now I can crank up the visual settings on it and still maintain 30fps (visual settings at 4 with vivid post processing on)

Considering the price of $130 Canadian on sale ($200 regular) at the time I bought it, it is a great card for the money...depending if you have AGP or PCI-express.

AGP - If your computer has a 350+ watt power supply and you have a 3+ year old graphics card, I'll highly consider it if you are looking for an Nvidia card since this is the best one for the aging interface. However, on Radeon side, you can find HD 2600 Pro/XT (~$100), HD 3650 ($~130) and HD 3850 (~$150), which will all deliver better performance and as well can work with Folding@Home

PCI express - Don't bother looking at a 7xxx series card. You can easily get a far much powerful card. Quick search on Canada Computer finds a Galaxy Geforce 9600GT Overclocked edition for $125 regular price (http://www.canadacomputers.com/index...id=999.243.390)

Here are my ratings for this card:
Price - 5 star (for AGP card)
Box - 4 star
Stuff in box - 5 star (everything is given to you, minus the display cable)
Performance - 4 star (was looking for 4x the FPS, but at least my games play at a solid frame rate now)
Overall - 4.5 stars

Hoped you enjoyed this review
-gamer11200