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ASUS EN7600GT (GeForce 7600 GT 256MB)

By Vijay Anand - 20 Mar 2006

Overclocking

Overclocking

Like the GeForce 7900 series, we had high expectations in overclocking the ASUS EN7600GT for it uses the new G73 core that's made with the 90nm engineering process. Of course, if the process for a particular part is not matured, like in the case of the G71 and G73 that are fairly young, the tendency to not able to hit high clock speeds is quite common. After all, the G71 core used in the GeForce 7900 GTX was initially targeted at being clocked at 700MHz (now commercially sold with a 650MHz stock clock), but NVIDIA had difficulties meeting that internal performance bar which they wished to achieve. If NVIDIA had time or if the yield was exceptionally good for those parameters, it might just have snatched the graphics card performance crown from ATI.

Back to the G73 core used by the GeForce 7600 GTX, it comes clocked at 560MHz, so it seemed like there might be some generous headroom. Regrettably, we found the ASUS EN7600GT only managing a meager overclock to 600MHz for the core. Even though the memory was willing to work way beyond the rated specifications of the 1.4ns memory chips at up to 1580MHz DDR, the net overclock was substantially hampered by the limited core speed bump. The final outcome was less than a 10% gain in performance, which although narrowed the gap between itself and a GeForce 7800 GT, the latter still held a substantial lead. We'll be testing more GeForce 7600 GT cards in a short while and through them, we'll know soon enough if it's worth the hassle and voiding the warranty to overclock this class of graphics cards.

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