Gainward Bliss 7300 GT Golden Sample
Benchmarking
I used the popular gaming benchmarks made by Futuremark to bench all four of the cards. I used 3dMark 03, 05 and 06. All benches were performed at stock speeds for this section. I ran all benchmarks from the stock settings just like the free versions to give you a good comparison of scores. I am grouping all three benchmarks together on one graph as this card is not really a “benchers card”. The individual benchmarks do however have their own use.
* 3DMark03 This is a benchmark that relies heavily on DirectX 8 features. This will give an indication of how the cards will run on games that rely on DX 8.
* 3DMark05 This benchmark requires some more features of directX 9 and gets slightly more taxing on the cards.
* 3DMark06 3dMark06 is the latest in the benchmarking tests from Futuremark. It has a lot of DirectX 9.0c features such as HDR and use of Shader model 3.0. This benchmark is very taxing for the card and also includes quite a harsh CPU benchmark.
Results
Here are the results obtained:
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!