Product Listing

Leadtek WinFast PX7300 GS TDH 256MB DDR2

By Vincent Chang - 26 Feb 2006

Conclusion

Conclusion

As the GeForce 7300 GS was first made available only in Asia last month, there have been more than a few nudges and winks about paper launches from some of the media, who were obviously oblivious to the fact that NVIDIA did mention that worldwide availability would follow soon after Asia's inception. Fortunately for NVIDIA, the budget GeForce 7 card should be available by now in most of Europe and the United States. Debuting at US$99, it should pose an extremely competitive threat to ATI's low-end Radeon lineup, especially the weaker but technologically similar HyperMemory versions. After all, the normal Radeon X1300 found it difficult to beat the Leadtek WinFast PX7300 GS in most of the benchmarks and the Leadtek was the undisputed winner once OpenGL games are taken into consideration. Already, GeForce 7300 GS prices are slipping below its launch price and it can be found for as low as US$80.

Want to bet that this card would sell more than NVIDIA's super card, the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB?

The Leadtek WinFast PX7300 GS is probably a rather accurate gauge of the performance of the GeForce 7300 GS GPU, given that its clock speeds are fairly typical. From the benchmarks, the GeForce 7300 GS has made a strong case in the low-end segment and should pose quite a few problems for the Radeon X1300 series, despite its 64-bit memory bandwidth. So far, the memory limitations are not yet that apparent in the games we tested, though naturally it should be more obvious at more intensive resolutions and settings. It also makes the maximum 512MB of addressable memory of the Leadtek a seemingly wasted attribute, since the bottleneck probably does not occur at the frame buffer level. You probably won't be playing the taxing first person shooter games on such a graphics card anyway. At less challenging and more common resolutions like 1024 x 768, the GeForce 7300 GS should suffice for casual gamers, who are also unlikely to own a top class monitor that actually utilizes the higher resolutions.

In fact, a main competitor for the GeForce 7300 GS could well be its own GeForce 6600. This originally mid-range card was generally the fastest card in our comparison, losing to the Leadtek only in 3DMark05, which to be fair, is not really a commercial game engine. Its market price of around US$100 should hence be very attractive to those who do not need the additional features unique to the GeForce 7 series. Fortunately for Leadtek, its WinFast PX7300 GS TDH 256MB DDR2 is also priced quite reasonably at US$85, which is a fair discount over the GeForce 6600 based on its weaker performance. If it fulfills its promise of producing decent HDTV output as hinted at by NVIDIA, it could prove to be a very viable and cheap alternative for media PC systems. Therefore, expect to find more GeForce 7300 GS cards in your budget and office systems in the near future.

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