[H]ard|OCP reviews MSI Geforce NX7900GS 512 MB OC video card
Microstar International (MSI) was founded in 1986 as a computer motherboard manufacturer. Since then, their product lineup has expanded to include barebones PCs, video cards, rackmount servers, networking equipment, and notebooks, among others. Since 2001, MSI has been expanding their manufacturing and distributing base into mainland China. Between their video card and motherboard manufacturing facilities, their annual productivity is estimated at over 27 million parts. They are an equal-opportunity video card manufacturer, producing video cards with both ATI and NVIDIA GPUs, and motherboards for both AMD and Intel CPUs.
Today we are evaluating MSI's 512 MB GeForce 7900 GS based PCI-express x16 video card, the NX7900GS-T2D512E-OC.
Launched in September 2006, the NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS is the little brother to the G71, known as the GeForce 7900 GT, 7950 GT, and 7900 GTX. The GeForce 7900 GS has 20 pixel shader pipelines, which gives it a fill rate of 9 GB per second. It has 7 vertex shaders, and 16 raster operators (ROPs). NVIDIA recommends a stock clock speed of 450 MHz on the GPU, and 1.32 GHz DDR (660 MHz actual) on the memory. A reference configuration calls for 256 MB of GDDR3 on a 256-bit memory bus. With the GeForce 7900 GS, NVIDIA introduced variable speed fans. Previous reference cooling devices from NVIDIA had fixed-speed fans that ran at 100% speed all of the time. Fans on the 7900 GS (and later) have a rotational speed that varies with the temperature of the video card, effectively quieting the devices under normal Windows operation...
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