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Most of the 7300 GTs released have a 350MHz core and 333.5MHz (667MHz effective) DDR2 memory. This isn't far off the specification of the 7600 GS, which runs at 400MHz core and 400 (800MHz effective) memory. However, the stock specifications are quite lax and many manufacturers are producing higher clocked versions, some even with DDR3 memory. This makes finding one a little confusing - Inno3D alone has a 256MB DDR3, 128MB DDR3 and 256MB DDR2 versions of this card and it's hard to differentiate them when looking around the e-tailers.

This particular card is the 256MB DDR3 version, which is casually referred to in the BIOS as 7300 GT OC - but if you want to find it online, you'll need the final four digits of the product code. In this case it is G5F3. This has the much higher 500MHz core speed and 700MHz (1,400MHz) memory. This is considerably above the "standard" speeds and is in fact closer to that of a 7600 GT, which operates a 560MHz core and the same memory.

As mentioned, compared to the previous 7300 cards, this uses the same core as the 7600 GT/GS. This means it also has the same 128-Bit memory interface. The main key difference here is that one of the quads and one of the vertex shaders is locked on this core. So unlike the 7600 GS/GT which has 12 pixel shaders, five vertex shaders and eight pixel output engines, the 7300 GT has only eight pixel shaders and four vertex shaders.

Above, you can see the card, which uses exactly the same PCB as a 7600 GT/GS. You might notice the SLI connector too – SLI is supported! The cooler is considerably quieter than the stock one on the 7600 GT. I didn't really consider the 7600 GT cooler to be considerably loud, but listening to this side by side there is a considerable noise difference.

The bundle is as minimal as you can get, with only a DVI connector and an S-Video cable included. Something I don't usually gripe about is the packaging, but this card actually arrived damaged – a capacitor had been knocked clean off the card. Luckily, this didn't affect the cards performance, but I did feel the packaging was a little sub-standard.

The memory on this card is Infineon 1.4ns memory instead of the Samsung chips we've seen on most cards. Quite a few cards are starting to come with this and it doesn't overclock quite as as the Samsung, which seems quite happy up to as high as 915MHz. This stuff, however, seems to be capping out around the 800MHz mark. In this case, I was able to get 780MHz (1560MHz effective).

What was most impressive was the core overclocking, which seemed to be never ending. We went from the stock 500MHz to an absolutely amazing 720MHz. It was completely stable at this setting and most importantly the benefits were obvious in the benchmark results giving as much as 30 per cent increase in performance. At resolutions such as 1,600 x 1,200 with 4x FSAA and 8x AF, it pushed the frame rates in our stock tests enough that it went from almost playable to playable.

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