MSI 7900GTO

A seemingly ordinary card but with a neat trick up its relatively cheap sleeve.

The 7900GTO is a familiar beast. Familiar, yet slightly odd. You see, it’s an ordinary 7900GTX, double slot cooler and all, with its memory clocked down from 800MHz to 660MHz – the core staying at the relatively feisty 650MHz. At first you’d be forgiven for thinking: ‘Why bother?’

Also odd is that MSI seems to be the only one in the country actually peddling the thing – but this is a good thing for it, as you’ll soon find out.

The appeal all comes down to two very easy to grip facts. Firstly, the GTO is about $70 to $100 cheaper than the GTX. Check. Secondly, the memory overclocks just fine to 800MHz – meaning you get a GTX for less money. Bargain!

If you’re particularly adventurous you could even go BIOS hacking to up the speed permanently – although we (and no doubt MSI) won’t be held responsible if you brick your card. Best stick with nTune.

At standard clocks in 3DMark06 SM3.0, Half-Life 2 and Call of Duty 2 at 1280x1024, it pulled 2334 3DMarks, 106.06fps and 43.90fps respectively. Bumping the resolution up to 1600x1200 reduced this to 1884, 84.00 and 34.42, while pushing to the 16:10 resolution of 1920x1200 saw 1600, 77.23 and 29.802 – still an admirable set of scores despite the crazy top resolution of our resident Dell 2405FPW.

We wish there was something more to say about this card, but considering how well known the GTX already is, we’ll just stick to what we’ve already said. GTX clocked slower, but can go faster. Its only weakness is that it’s a DX 9 card in a soon to be completely DX 10 world – but considering that shift will probably take a year to be realised, it’s not the worst investment someone could make to tide them over until it becomes mainstream.

In short: Is GTO. Is good.