Foremost, we believe it most important to discuss the pricing of the GeForce 7900 GS. The 7900 GS has been launched at a price point of $220. This move places the 7900 GS in an interesting position of the market, one in which it is not only competing with ATI’s offerings, but also potentially with a select number of 7900 GT video cards that at times can be found for around $230 (using rebates).  

NVIDIA has also made sure that the GeForce 7900 GS is available for retail immediately at launch, reaffirming their seriousness in launching new products that have immediate availability and don’t just end up being paper launches. Immediate availability at launch is usually greatly appreciated by system builders who don’t want to face waiting for availability of a new video card that they want to buy.

The benchmarks we have run today show the 7900 GS to be completely competitive in terms of performance and price when compared to the Radeon X1800 GTO2. The 7900 GS often turned out to be the leading performer in standard rendering tests and still remained competitive with antialiasing and anisotropic filtering enabled at higher resolutions.  

As we have stated before, the GeForce 7900 GS offers impressive performance for its price. However, although the 7900 GS usually ended up as the winner in standard rendering tests, we could not declare a true winner between the X1800 GTO2 and the 7900 GS when the video cards were tested at higher resolutions with AA and AF enabled. This was simply because the performance both video cards offered turned out to be very similar.

As our tests show, the 7900 GS has great potential for overclocking. On our reference board, we were able to reach a fully stable clock of 560 MHz Core and 1730 MHz memory, up from 450 MHz/1,320 MHz, respectively. Testing the overclocked 7900 GS in Far Cry, we had an overall 20% gain in performance, pretty impressive to say the least.  

With the GeForce 7900 GS, NVIDIA has shown that they are increasing their competitiveness by having their products deliver more performance for the price. As NVIDIA’s new mid-range product, the GeForce 7900 GS does not disappoint and is a welcome addition to the $200-250 price range. For those of you who are buying a video card on a budget and are also looking for a solution that has headroom for overclocking,  the GeForce 7900 GS is a video card we suggest you check out.