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The nVidia cards were tested on an Asus A8N32-SLI using an Athlon 64 FX-60, 2GB of CMX1024-3500LLPRO RAM and a Seagate Barracuda ST340083A8 hard disk. Power was supplied by a Tagan 900W TG900-U95. For ATI testing, everything was kept the same except for the use of an Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe and an Etasis 850W ET850.

All of the nVidia cards were tested using the WHQL 84.21 ForceWare drivers. Although the 7300 GT is not officially supported by this driver, I modified the INF file to support the new card. I don't like to use beta drivers if I can get away with it and as this was not a new architecture there was no reason why I shouldn't use WHQL drivers instead. The 7600 GT results were tested using the slightly older 84.17, but the performance difference is almost negligible between 84.21 and 84.17. The X1300 was tested using the official Catalyst 6.5 drivers.

Using our proprietary automated benchmarking suite, aptly dubbed 'SpodeMark 3D', I ran Call of Duty 2, Counter Strike: Source, Quake 4, Battlefield 2 and 3DMark 06. Bar 3DMark06, these all run using our in-house pre-recorded timedemos in the most intense sections of each game I could find. Each setting is run three times and the average is taken, for reproducible and accurate results. As these are low-end cards, I ran at slightly different resolutions. I ran each game test at 1,024 x 768, 1,280 x 1,024, 1,600 x 1,200 each at 0x FSAA with trilinear filtering, 2x FSAA with 4x AF and 4x FSAA with 8x AF.

In our performance graphs, I have included results from the Leadtek 7600 GS as well as the 7600 GT.

3DMark06 really sums things up nicely. The X1300 is really quite a poor performer, while the Inno3D 7300 GT is not only faster by several factors than the X1300, but even out performs the 7600 GS. The 7600 GT obviously out performs all of these, but the gap isn't quite as big when it comes to the real games.

Battlefield 2 shows the 7300 GT as 2-3 times the speed of the X1300. Frame rate differences of 37.6 to 91.0 at 1,024 x 768 are really quite significant. At the higher resolutions the differences are even greater, with the X1300 struggling to make playable frame rates at all in most of the games. It's not even worth quoting the number of places where 7300 GT wins, as it is just all out faster by such a huge amount.

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