Futuremark 3D Mark

These synthetic systems tests from Futuremark give you a good overall idea of performance between the video cards; you should not solely rely on these results though as the game benchmarks do not always reflect these rankings. It?s during these tests that we realized that the 7600GT got slower if we repeated the benchmarks for several times in loop. While most of these scores relate to those obtained in our mid-range VGA roundup the effect of throttling on the 7600GT can still be seen.






Overclocking

These were the maximum frequencies we could obtain with each card, we pointed a fan to the passive heatsink on the MSI 7600GT to prevent overheating.

X1800GTO
Core clock: 585MHz (500MHz stock)
Memory clock: 621MHz (500MHz stock)

7600GT
Core clock: 600MHz (560MHz stock)
Memory clock: 814MHz (700MHz stock)


Quite a nice increase for both cards, how does that reflect in in-game:


Both cards get ~7 extra frames overall when overclocked, which can be the difference between below 30FPS unplayable and 35FPS acceptable.



Cooling

I logged temperatures over a period of time with Rivatuner while running Futuremark 3DMark05 in loop to stress the GPU.

X1800GTO

The copper/aluminum heatsink in combination with the small fan keeps the R520 core at a nice 71?C on load. The fan remained quiet true testing and was not audible above my stock AMD CPU cooler.

7600GT ? Passive Cooling

78?C maximum temperature doesn?t seem like very high, unfortunately it did seem to trigger the speed throttling of the core. So we added fan.

7600GT ? With Active Cooling (fan pointed to heatsink)

The 18?C drop is impressive and it also stopped the speed throttling, given us higher scores in 3DMark.

Time to wrap it up ->