Overclock3D.Net :: Print Page :: Gainward Bliss 7300 GT Golden Sample

I feel the back of the box could have had some more interesting and relevant product information on it, rather than just some nVidia marketing fluff.

It's an attractive package all in all but I would like to have seen the cards cooling solution pictured somewhere on it.

Inside of the box I was not very impressed with the packaging at all actually. There does not seem to be much to protect the card inside the small box. Having said that, my sample came in perfect condition and the card looks fairly hardy so I cannot envisage this being too much of a problem.

Will the diminutive size of the packaging continue through to the card itself? Let's see...

Very compact and certainly not noisy! The card looks attractive with its red colour and would be suited to a case with a window.

The back of the card is secured by this clever little mechanism that we have seen before on Gainward's higher-end 7900GT card. It is a good solution and also looks good.

You can see that the heatsink has deep grooves for the air to pass through.

As you can see the card is a pretty small solution. A nice fit for any HTPC.

There are a decent range of connecters on the card, though I always like to see Dual DVI. Still - TV-out, DVI and VGA is a decent range of connecters for any lower-end video card and ideal for HTPC use as I have noted previously.

Quick Features (taken from Gainward's website)

Note that this says that the card has a cooling fan - I don't think so!

nVidia Specifications:

NVIDIA® GeForce® 7 Series Specifications

NVIDIA® CineFX® 4.0 Shading Architecture

* Vertex Shaders
o Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader 3.0
o Displacement mapping
o Geometry instancing
o Infinite length vertex programs
* Pixel Shaders
o Support for DirectX 9.0 Pixel Shader 3.0
o Full pixel branching support
o Support for Multiple Render Targets (MRTs)
o Infinite length pixel programs
* Next-Generation Texture Engine
o Accelerated texture access
o Up to 16 textures per rendering pass
o Support for 16-bit floating point format and 32-bit floating point format
o Support for non-power of two textures
o Support for sRGB texture format for gamma textures
o DirectX and S3TC texture compression
* Full 128-bit studio-quality floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline with native hardware support for 32bpp, 64bpp, and 128bpp rendering modes

64-Bit Texture Filtering and Blending

* Delivers true high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting support
* Full floating point support throughout entire pipeline
* Floating point filtering improves the quality of images in motion
* Floating point texturing drives new levels of clarity and image detail
* Floating point frame buffer blending gives detail to special effects like motion blur and explosions

NVIDIA® Intellisample^TM 4.0 Technology

* Advanced 16x anisotropic filtering (with up to 128 taps)
* Blistering-fast antialiasing and compression performance
* Gamma-adjusted rotated-grid antialiasing removes jagged edges for incredible image quality
* Transparent multisampling and transparent supersampling modes boost antialiasing quality to new levels
* Support for normal map compression
* Support for advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data at even higher resolutions and frame rates
* Fast z-clear

NVIDIA® UltraShadow^TM II Technology

* Designed to enhance the performance of shadow-intensive games

NVIDIA® SLI^TM Technology1

* Patented hardware and software technology allows two GeForce-based graphics cards to run in parallel to scale performance and enhance image quality on today's top titles.
* Quad SLI technology enabled through select System Builders delivers SLI support for four GPUs, providing mind-blowing performance and image quality at extreme resolutions. SLI support for the GeForce 7950 GX2 will be provided through a future NVIDIA ForceWare driver release. See www.slizone.com for details

NVIDIA® PureVideo^TM Technology

* Dedicated on-chip video processor
* High-definition H.264, MPEG2 and WMV9 decode acceleration
* Advanced spatial-temporal de-interlacing
* Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
* High-quality video scaling
* Video color correction
* Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window

NVIDIA® TurboCache^TM Technology2

* Combines the capacity and bandwidth of dedicated video memory with dynamically allocated system memory to dramatically turbocharge performance

Built for Microsoft® Windows Vista^TM

* Third-generation GPU architecture built for Windows Vista
* Delivers best possible experience when running Windows Vista 3D graphical user interface
* New OS supported by renowned NVIDIA® Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) for maximum stability and reliability
* NVIDIA® PureVideo^TM technology delivers high-quality VMR pipeline for best-in-class video for Windows Vista

Advanced Display Functionality

* Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for analog display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz
* Dual-link DVI capability to drive the industry's largest and highest resolution digital flat panel displays up to 2560x16001
* Integrated HDTV encoder provides analog TV-output (Component/Composite/S-Video) up to 1080i resolution
* Full NVIDIA® nView® multi-display technology capability

High Speed Interfaces

* Designed for PCI Express x16
* Designed for high-speed GDDR3 memory1

NVIDIA® Digital Vibrance Control® (DVC) 3.0 Technology

* DVC color controls
* DVC image sharpening controls

Operating Systems

* Windows XP/Windows XP 64
* Built for Microsoft Windows Vista
* Windows 2000
* Linux
* Macintosh OS X

API Support

* Complete DirectX support, including the latest version of Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0
* Full OpenGL support, including OpenGL 2.0

1 Feature available on select GeForce 7 Series GPUs only.
2 Feature available on GeForce 7300 GS and LE GPUs only.

Package

The package included in the 7300GT is pretty sparse with only:

* Gainward Driver Package (including Gainward Expertool Overclocking facility)
* S-video to Component/composite and S-video out
* DVI-VGA converter
* Quick-Start Instuction Manual

I am aware that this is a low-end card but I think perhaps one piece of DVD software could have been included in the bundle - as this is a card that could well be used in a HTPC.

Cooling

There is not much else you can say about this cooler than has already been said. It is well designed, keeps the GPU cool and is totally silent. Gainward have done very well with the cooling and I am most impressed with the cooler.

Here are the general settings I managed to play F.E.A.R. with:

Here are the minimum, maximum and average FPS:

F.E.A.R is a very testing game and I did not quite manage to get the card running F.E.A.R at 1280 x 1024. If you play F.E.A.R. a lot then you will have to consider a more expensive GPU. If, however, you play F.E.A.R. occasionally or maybe just want to know that your GPU can play F.E.A.R. and look good then it definitely does the job.

Call of Duty 2

Call of Duty 2 is a fairly recent game that uses a lot of DirectX 9.0c features, including real time shadows, amazing smoke effects and some nice looking HDR effects. This makes the game very taxing. I played a fully patched up version of the game. Once again I played through the game with a two minute gaming session including explosions, smoke and also lots of snow.

As stated, I tried for the closest to 1280 x 1024 possible while looking as good as possible. Here are the settings used in-game:

Here are the general settings I managed to play CoD 2 with:

Here are the minimum, maximum and average FPS:

I was highly impressed that the 7300GT attained the target resolution and played the game so smoothly. This is a very challenging game and still looks great even with some features turned down a bit.

The card managed Quake 4 very well and the gameplay was very smooth and enjoyable. nVidia have a great record with the doom 3 engine and the 7300GT did extremely well at playing Quake 4. I reached the target resolution with this game and it was on High Quality settings which looked excellent.

Oblivion

Oblivion is an awesome RPG with a simply huge immersive environment, great graphics and incredibly realistic scenery. This game is currently one of the most testing games that you can buy and it is certainly a test of the 7300GT. I chose to do a run-through of the Arena part of the game. I spoke to a character, did some magic whilst in a fight and fought in the arena that is pretty huge. Also as well as doing this test I took a wander around to make sure that the benchmark resembled the general gameplay with each card. This benchmark really tests today's cards and nVidia has not come out of this so well in previous reviews.

As stated, I tried for the closest to 1280 x 1024 possible while looking as good as possible. Here are the settings used in-game:

Here are the general settings I managed to play Oblivion with:

Here are the minimum, maximum and average FPS:

Oblivion is the most testing of my game suit. The card managed to run the game at 1024 x 768 with HDR enabled. This is highly impressive and anyone who has played Oblivion can attest to how good HDR looks in the game. Although I didn't reach the target 1280 x 1024 I felt that the game ran very nicely. With a bit more time and tweaking of settings Oblivion should look even better. I did have to turn down the view distance as once outside the FPS took a bit of a drop.

Now onto some quick benchmarks...

In my opinion the card performed very well in these benchmarks and I was thoroughly impressed with the scores obtained. 1664 is a very reasonable 3DMark06 score, especially for a card that is meant to be low end.

Overclocking

As stated before, I could not get the coolbits registry hack to work with this card. Whether it was my own fault, or the card simply not being enabled for this in nVidia's drivers I do not know. Not giving up I fired up Gainward's excellent "Expert Tool" and used the overclocking facility on this. This worked a treat and the card proved to be a great overclocker, despite only having passive cooling!

487/417 is very good considering the stock clock on this card. That ramps the memory speed up to 834 - pretty high above stock. I ran a 3DMark06 to test whether this would affect the cards 3D performance:

That's a pretty impressive score over stock. The card was a very nice overclocker. Remember this is with stock silent cooling and no volt-mods at all!