Product Listing

ASUS EN7600GT (GeForce 7600 GT 256MB)

By Vijay Anand - 20 Mar 2006

The GeForce 7600 GT - A GeForce 6600 GT Successor

The GeForce 7600 GT - A GeForce 6600 GT Successor

Nearly a year after the inception of the GeForce 7series, the family is now complete with the formation of the GeForce 7600 series. Debuting with the GeForce 7600 GT, it is billed as a high-speed midrange warrior and has been christened by the hardware community as the successor to the legendary GeForce 6600 GT that has braved the test of time. Even before anyone tested the GeForce 7600 GT, the sheer reputation of the predecessor left everyone with high expectations of the new comer and hopefully bringing about yet another price-to-performance super card. Judging by our test results of the ASUS EN7600GT (which is configured at the reference clock speeds), the GeForce 7600 GT is easily 50% to a full 100% faster than the GeForce 6600 GT. Not only does it totally eclipse its predecessor, but also manages to beat the GeForce 6800 GS and ATI's Radeon X1600 XT effortlessly by a margin of 20%. These are impressive performance statistics for a card that is marketed at the US$199 price range and easily comes off as the better card for recommendation of the three others compared.

So the GeForce 7600 GT comes as a totally convincing buy on most fronts, which is true till you consider the operational noise of this petite card. Equipped with a small cooler unit and high operating clock speeds, the GeForce 7600 GT can get fairly audible when playing games, which is when the card is most taxed. Noise isn't an issue if you are concerned only while in the Windows environment. However if you are gaming, the noise can get rather distinct. NVIDIA graphics cards were rather quiet for the most part of the last two years, which is why the rebirth of a famous graphics card model with a noise issue is a real dampener for some of you folks. On a lighter note, the worst modern graphics cards in terms of operational noise still goes to the Radeon X1000 series with reference coolers, hence the GeForce 7600 GT isn't all too bad.

The ASUS EN7600GT goes for a lean package, a lean price (surprisingly), but the graphics card and its entire package still ranks as 'normal' in our books.

The ASUS EN7600GT unfortunately does not innovate to bring about a quieter computing experience and instead still uses the reference cooler, immediately giving it a blemish that would put off some sensitive computer users. Operational noise concerns aside, the EN7600GT works like a charm as long as it is within its specifications. Overclocking is lackluster, but that's something we figured that it may be a trait among most GeForce 7600 GT cards as even the so-called 'extreme editions' of other brands are clocked within the EN7600GT's maximum overclock ceiling. Other than a better cooler unit, what we would have of course liked to see are better software/game bundle and cable accessories, which were lacking with the EN7600GT package. What might just move you to get the ASUS EN7600GT is probably its enticing price tag (US$199), which is something that you don't often see people associating with ASUS products in general. Overall, a fairly decent deal for a good graphics card that could have been better with a little more effort on the vendor's part if not for the haste to reach the store shelves first.

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