Installation of the card was fairly painless. The card's increased length, due to the heatsink, caused it not to fit just right and I had to relocate one of my hard drives down a bay. However, that was the only problem I ran into while installing the card. Everything else popped right into place as it should.
Using the included drivers was another quick and easy process. Just pop in the disk, tell it to install, go through the installation process and, boom, you’ve got it all up and running in less than 25 minutes.
Testing:
To test the card I ran 3DMark05 in the following configurations. Tests were run with the latest drivers at the time of this writing (ForceWare 93.91 and Catalyst 6.6, respectivley)
I also ran these tests against an ATI Radeon x1300 to get scores to compare against. Not exactly the fairest matchup in the world, but it factors in that the x1300 has a higher price tag than the 7300GT.
Test System
CPU: Intel 530J single core (hyperthreading enabled) clocked at 3.00ghz
Motherboard: ASUS P5LD2
Memory: 512MB
Hard Drives:
Western Digital 80gig (primary)
Maxtor DiamondMax 120 gig
Western Digital 300 gig
Test Results:
(best scores are bolded)
Card
ATI Radeon x1300
nVidia 7300GT
Composites
800x600 NOAA
2650
3802
800x600 4AA 4AS
2263
3173
1024x760 NOAA
2216
3302
1024x760 4AS 4AA
1866
2642
Card
ATI Radeon x1300
nVidia 7300
FPS
800x600 NOAA
Game Test 1
12.6fps
16.7fps
Game Test 2
7.8fps
11.3fps
Game Test 3
12.2fps
18.6fps
800x600 4AA 4AS
Game Test 1
10.8fps
14.4fps
Game Test 2
6.5fps
9.0fps
Game Test 3
10.6fps
15.9fps
1024x760 NOAA
Game Test 1
10.2fps
14.7fps
Game Test 2
6.8fps
9.7fps
Game Test 3
10.1fps
16.2fps
1024x760 4AS 4AA
Game Test 1
8.6fps
11.9fps
Game Test 2
5.6fps
7.5fps
Game Test 3
8.7fps
13.3fps
Game Tests:
This is a little more open section here. There aren’t any real benchmarks, so I’m just going to express my personal feelings over using the card in games.
With Oblivion, I set it to 1024x768 resolution and medium textures, The game ran smoothly and looked great, also. It did seem to lag while riding a horse and medium range trees looked a little ugly. Battlefield 2 running at 1024x768 with settings at medium ran smooth and looked great.
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