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Foxconn 7900GS

8.5

Format PC

Price 130

Manufacturer Foxconn

Contact www.foxconnchannel.com

15-Feb-2007 Powerful and mid-range performance for your folding stuff

Like any production process, graphics processor manufacturing is not a perfect science. As a GPU matures in the marketplace, a manufacturer's stock of sub-standard cores turns into a bin-load. Then several bin-loads.

That's about the time when cards like the 7900GS appear. You see, those chips aren't just
thrown in the garbage compactor to be nibbled at by tubular alien lifeforms. If a GPU comes off the conveyor belt a bit wonky, and has, say, a quad of pixel pipelines disabled, it's by no means unusable, and when you get enough identically wonky cores, you effectively have a new product line.

The resulting cards aren't quite as fiery as those they were originally destined to become, but are often very good nonetheless, as they're touted at a much lower price-point. Indeed, this is how most mid-range cards are born, and as an interesting footnote, the same process, known as binning, goes on with CPUs as well. Take this 7900GS, for instance: as midrange cards go, it's both a great performer
and excellent value for money.

Unlike the stonking great highenders, it's a fairly svelte little single slot card, and does a great job of staying cool under pressure. It's also pretty quiet; in short, it's an elegant little card. And it fares admirably at normal desktop resolutions, too: while most of us yearn for a 30" panel displaying a resolution of 2,560 x 1,600, most of us are still using bog standard 17" or 19" panels, the upper resolution limit of which is 1280 x 1024.

And that's where this card shines. At 1280 x 960 with 2x antialiasing and 4x anisotropic filtering, it runs F.E.A.R. at an altogether creamy 64fps - and bear in mind 60fps is the target for a 'seamless' gaming experience. This real-world figure is backed up by 3DMark06, in which the 7900GS achieves 4,491 marks at 1280 x 1024.

In short, if you're not stretching things to higher resolutions, you won't be disappointed with what it can achieve. And, being a GeForce card, it'll happily slip into a twin-card SLI setup with zero fuss. SLI typically gives around a 50-70% frames per-second increase over a standalone card, and while we've yet to test this exact setup, we're confident that a pair of these will happily drive games to highly acceptable performance at 1600 x 1200 too, so if you're the proud owner of a fatter panel than that, then dual-GPU gaming can be yours for the less-than-princely sum of £260. Or even cheaper if you shop around - the least expensive version of the 7900GS we've seen is from manufacturer Palit, which is available for an exceedingly reasonable £119 on scan.co.uk. Never has great performance been so affordable.

PC Gamer