FiringSquad reviews XFX GeForce 7600 GT 580M AGP video card
First introduced last March, the GeForce 7600 GT is the spiritual successor to two of NVIDIA's most popular GPUs: the GeForce 6600 GT and before it, the GeForce4 Ti 4200. Like the aforementioned graphics processors, the 7600 GT is designed to deliver the absolute best bang for the buck: all three were introduced with a $200 MSRP, although in each case NVIDIA took a different path to get there.
In the case of the GeForce 7600 GT, a quick and dirty analogy for the GPU is that it's half a GeForce 7900 GT. Its G73 GPU has half the pixel shaders as GeForce 7900 GT (12 versus 24), half the ROPS (8 versus 16), and half the memory interface (128-bit versus 256-bit). Essentially the only portion of the GeForce 7600 GT that isn't sliced in half are the vertex shaders. NVIDIA equips the GeForce 7600 GT with five vertex units, whereas the GeForce 7900 GT has eight. NVIDIA even integrates one dual-link DVI transmitter into the GeForce 7600 GT, while the 7900 family has two dual-link DVI ports.
To keep performance up however, the GeForce 7600 GT runs at very high clock speeds. The graphics core runs at 560MHz, that's over 100MHz higher than 7900 GT and 160MHz faster than GeForce 6600 GT, while its memory runs at an even 700MHz, yielding up to 22.4GB/sec of peak memory bandwidth. That's a little over half the bandwidth of a GeForce 7900 GT, and 6.4GB/sec more than GeForce 6600 GT...
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