The past few generations of graphics products have seen both ATI and Nvidia locked in a battle to get sales from the discerning buyer. This has obviously benefited the consumer and the state of the market today is exceptionally healthy from low end to high end. A popular card falling into the mid to high end sector is Nvidia's 7900 GT and today we are taking a look at the MSI version . ATI's competiting product is the X1900GT and we have two retail X1900 GT's in for testing today, first up is Powercolor and we'll also take a look at the Connect 3D version to see if experiences differ depending on the brand purchased.

The 7900GT

MSI's 7900 GT is a relatively small card as the following image shows. Its also nice to see that as well as a reasonably small PCB the card features a relatively small cooler (copper). There is however no cooling on the memory. As with the higher end GTX part the 7900 GT does require an external power source and the connector can be found in the top right of the card. Core speed on the 7900GT is 450Mhz.

The eight DDR3 memory chips are manufactured by Samsung and in 3d operation are clocked at 660mhz. All are located on the front of the card and in fact the rear of the card is relatively plain.

Display outputs on the MSI 7900GT come in the form of two DVI outputs and a tv out which is capable of HDTV and S-video signals.

MSI's packaging is good. The front of the box gives some basic information on the card such as the amount of memory and display outputs. When the box is opened we find the card is stored securely by foam and the extra cables are well packaged too. Underneath the main part of the box we also find the various software CD's containing drivers, game (King Kong) and applications.