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The long awaited response to ATI's mighty R580 core has finally surfaced with the launch of Nvidia's G71 core.
As with its predecessor the 7800, the 7900 comes in two flavours, the high end GTX and the mainstream GT.
The 7900GT, as featured here, is built on the same 90nm architecture as the faster 7900GTX, but has half the memory (256MB) and slower clock speeds - 450MHz core and 660MHz memory (1,320MHz effective).
It also has the same number of pixel pipelines and vertex shaders as the 7900GTX; 24 and 8 respectively.
While the 7900GTX has the dual slot heatpipe and heatsink cooling solution last seen on the 512MB 7800GTX, the 7900GT has a neat single slot solution with only the core being cooled, the memory chips are left bare.
In our 3Dmark05 benchmark, the 7900 clocked up a score of 7,666. This beats most standard 7800GTX cards (Nvidia's previous king of the hill) and, as ever, can be linked up in an SLI configuration to provide even faster performance.
Far Cry managed to reach 72.68fps (frames per second) with the 7900GT, which again compares favourably with the 7800GTX.
In terms of price, the 7900GT's closest ATI competitor is the Radeon X1800 XL. In our benchmarks, it managed to outperform ATI's effort, though not by a huge amount. The X1800 XL scored 6,997 in 3Dmark05 and 70.96fps in Far Cry.
Pricing for the 7900GT varies. We found an XFX version for £257, but it was out of stock - it's a similar story elsewhere. Meanwhile, ATI's X1800 XL can be bought for an almost identical price.
Nvidia seems to have achieved what it set out to do with the 7900GT - to beat the similarly priced offering from ATI.
Thanks to the cool-running nature of the 7900GT, we expect a few vendors to be releasing fanless versions in the near future.
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