Image Quality

Rather than going through the motions of image quality at each setting, I've decided to take a more real world perspective on it as we did with our benchmarking.  I only play games at the max quality level a card can handle and still give playable rates.  In the screen shot below, we find Need for Speed: Most Wanted with all the eye candy maxed out.  You be the judge for the quality.

Overclocking

Using the Coolbits registry entry we fished around back and forth until we found a stable overclock.  Stable being defined as no visible artifacts or visual anomalies at all.  The card's stock GPU/Memory settings are 450/1320MHz.  We found our stable ceiling to be 516MHz on the core, a 12.7% increase and 784MHz (1568MHz DDR) on the memory, a 15.8% increase.  Not too shabby.  Imagine the memory speeds that may be possible if the RAM had SOME or ANY kind of cooling on it!  Back to our Zetar Wetlands map on Battlefield 2, let's take another look.

Minimum 7800 GTX - 47  /  Minimum 7900 GS - 48  /  Minimum 7900 GS OC - 37
Maximum 7800 GTX - 91  /  Maximum 7900 GS - 88  /  Maximum 7900 GS OC - 89
Average 7800 GTX - 71  /  Average 7900 GS - 70  /  Average 7900 GS OC - 75

And you thought a $200 meant only midrange didn't you?  The GeForce 7900 GS proves us wrong there and puts out in a big way.

Conclusion

Inno3D has a solid product with NVidia's GeForce 7900 GS.  Performance and image quality proved to be excellent along with nice gains with the card when overclocked.  The real story in my eyes is in its pricing.  The Inno3D GeForce 7900 GS brings top shelf performance to the table for 200 clams.  With the 7900 GS being SLI ready, even more performance gains are possible by running two 7900 GS cards.  $400 for a pair of these cards is less than a single unit of the upper high end of the 7900 line but you can run one now and add a second later which is much easier on the upgrade budget. 

The only concern which isn't exactly a fair shot is the lack of memory cooling.  This is easily rectified with an aftermarket GPU/Memory cooling assembly.  That should be a notable because as you recall, we got the memory jacked up to 1568MHz stark naked.  Imagine what could be possible with some active cooling.

As I think you can tell, I'm a big fan of Inno3D's GeForce 7900 GS on several levels.  With this card being a hard launch and available now, you would be hard pressed to not be thrilled with this card as an upgrade in itself or as part one of a SLI upgrade for later.  A big big thanks go to Caroline over at Inno3D for her ongoing patience and support of the OC Cafe' and sponsoring this review.