Which GeForce 7600GS AGP is the best?

I got my hands on 5 different versions of GeForce 7600GS. This Nvidia GPU is quite popular choice for WinXP retro builds so here is the short comparison. Does brand matter? Passive or Active cooling? Which one is overall the best choice? Let's find out.

Contenders:

MSI 7600GS 256MB DDR2 128bit Core: 400Mhz Memory: 800Mhz

GIGABYTE 7600GS 256MB DDR2 128bit Core: 400Mhz Memory: 800Mhz

ASUS 7600GS 256MB DDR2 128bit Core: 400Mhz Memory: 800Mhz

GAINWARD 7600GS 256MB DDR3 128bit Core: 450Mhz Memory: 1100Mhz

GALAXY 7600GS 256MB DDR3 128bit Core: 500Mhz Memory: 1450Mhz

Test Settings:

Hardware: AMD Athlon XP 2500+ 1.8Ghz (Barton), 2.5GB RAM Dual Channel DDR400,

Operating system: WindowsXP 32bit SP3

Drivers: nvidia ForceWare 307.83

Each graphics card was prepared according to procedures:

- the new thermal paste was applied (Arctic MX-4)

- warmed up by playing games until the idle/load temperatures have stabilized

- four synthetic benchmarks in suite bench: 3dmark2001SE, 3dmark2005, 3dmark2006, Furmark 1.6.5

ASUS, MSI and GIGABYTE show pretty similar results across the board which is expected. They share the similar design of the PCB - passive cooling, same memory modules and clocks. GAINWARD and GALAXY show slightly higher figures due to having much faster DDR3 memory chips installed and higher clocked gpu cores.

Temperatures were measured in HWiNFO32 in Celsius Degrees. Ambient temperature was about 24C. The minimum temperature was recorded at the beginning of 3dmark2001SE and the maximum in Furmark as was the final test.

Obviously "the hottest" graphics cards in the comparison are the ones with passive cooling. I recorded temps as high as 89C under stress which is actually pretty common for these generation of GPUs if they passively cooled. But it's worth noting here that those high temps are up to the particular units. For some other units of the same Gigabyte or Asus I have in my collection I measured max 60-70 C under load. It's a kind of silicon lottery.

Although it didn't seem to impact directly the benchmark scores or stability, it would be very wise to provide a little better airflow in the case for that reason alone.

Conclusion: Two cards from comparison stand out in my opinion: Galaxy 7600GS featuring superior cooling solution from ZALMAN and overall best performance. And Gigabyte 7600GS having great balance of performance and passive cooling temps. Too bad they never created passively cooled DDR3 editions of 7600GS series, that would be interesting.

So here it is. All cards should deliver pretty solid performance for WindowsXP gaming rig but be aware of the high temps of some passive versions of this gpu.