opinionated3's Full Review: PNY GeForce® 7600 GS, (512 MB) AGP Video Card
It finally became necessary to upgrade the video card in my wife's computer, as the one she has is not powerful enough to play the new generation of PC video games. I recently purchased a new game called Might and Magic; Heroes V and it wouldn't even run because of the video game didn't support our Nvidia GeForce 5500 series graphics card. That meant in order for her to play her brand new game I had to go out to the computer store and buy a new card for her computer.
The following day I was at CompUSA looking for a better graphics card and I picked one up. I had a couple of requirements of the new card that I had to meet; one was it had to be Nvidia GeForce based and it had to be 8x AGP. The latter was because our older motherboard doesn't support the new PCIe interface of the new graphics cards. The Nvidia requirement is because I will not use anything other than Nvidia based graphics cards in our computers at home. I have tried the ATI based cards at work and I just don't care for them, besides they are a pain in the rear to install (I will discuss this a little later).
The graphic card I selected was the PNY GeForce 7600GS 512 MB Graphics Card and if you read further you will see why I think I made a great choice.
PNY GeForce 7600GS 512MB Graphic Card
I have bought several other products from PNY so I am familiar with the brand and have had alot of success so I didn't expect to have any problem with this card and as of yet I haven't. As I said earlier I selected this specific graphic card because it had to be a 8x AGP type card because the motherboard in my wifes computer didn't support the newer PCIe graphics cards.
Another important feature of this card that I was looking for was the amount of onboard video memory, this is important because it means I don't have to worry about any of the computers system memory being taken away for the video. This card has 512MB DDR2 memory which is double the memory of our old GeforceFX 5500 video card.
If you are one of those people that use a dual monitor setup this card will work for you. It has one 15pin connector and one DVI connector. PNY included a DVI-I to VGA adapter if you are using two VGA monitors. One of the extra features of this card is that you can connect it to the back of your TV and use it to increase the size of your display. Using the S-Video and RCA jacks on the outside of the card you can connect it to your TV as long as your TV is equipped with the S-Video jack. It comes with it's own 3 ft S-video cable to attach to your TV. For those looking for a HD connection, PNY has included HDTV breakout pod, which you can connect to a HDTV.
Installation
While reading through the documentation that came with the video card it recommended that I remove the driver from the old video card before installing this card. I went into Windows control panel and removed the old NVIDIA driver and with that taken care of I shut down the computer and opened up the case and removed the old video card and installed the new one. After powering on the computer I came up and identified the new card and asked for the driver CD. I popped in the CD and it did the rest. Note: It is a good idea to go out to NVIDIA's website and down load the latest drivers.
Testing
After getting the new driver from NVIDIA, I decided to test it out with a few games. The first game I tried was a simialtion game called Sid Meier's Railroad, it is a very graphic intensive game with all of its special effects. When I last tried this game using the old graphics card I had shut off all of the special features because they overloaded and locked up the computer. So the first thing I did after loading the game was to turn on all of the special effects to see if this more powerful video card could handle it. I was pleasantly surprised that with all of the featured tun on the action was very smooth and it didn't look up the computer. The next test was going to be the real big test for the card; a game called Might and Magic Heroes V. With the old video card it would barely let the game load before it started locking up the computer. This time was completely different, after loading the game for my son (I don't play this type of game) he started playing it. He didn't have a single issue playing the game with the new video card.
The Nvidia GeForce 7600gs GPU is a 128bit 400 MHz Core Clock processor with dual 400MHz RAMDAC's. Coupled with the 512MB of DDR memory onboard this card is capable of some pretty impressive graphics. Built in full Microsoft DirectX® 9.0 Shader 3.0 support helps this card provide stunning and complex effects for cinematic realism, accord to PNY's website.
PNY includes aluminum heat sinks and a fan to keep the GPU (Graphic Processor Unit) and the memory chips cool.
The PNY GeForce 7600GS features three output connectors; 15 pin sub din SVGA, DVI-I and S-video. The 15pin connector and DVI-I are used to connect to PC monitor and using the S-Video on the outside of the card you can connect it to your TV as long as your TV is equipped with the S-Video jack.
This card has the capability of connecting to the widest range of monitors that I have ever seen; it ranges from 600 x 800 all the way to an amazing 2560 x 1600. Our little 17"Dell flat panel barely taxes this card with its native 1280 x 1024 resolution.
System Requirements
Intel Pentium 4/III/II/Celeron , AMD K6/Duron/Athlon/Athlon XP
Minimum of 300watt power supply
AGP 2.0 Slot open
256MB of system memory
50MB available drive space
Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP OS
CD-ROM drive
My final thoughts
I am so glad I decided on this card, as soon as we had it installed and launched Sid Meier's Railroad we could see the dramatic difference this newer and more powerful card was going to make. The next thing we did was turn on all of the special effects we had to turn off to make it work with the old video card and we were blown away by the effects.
Since this card has 512MB of onboard memory we didn't have to worry about it needing to use any of the system memory to run the graphics.
Not only did it improve our gaming experience, it has made a dramatic improvement on our video playback and Internet surfing. I can't see any reason as of yet that we would need another video card in this computer unless for some reason it stops working.
I do have to mention that we have recently started experiencing a bit of a problem involving a new PC game that I got for my son called Battlefield 2142. At some point the game will lock up and after rebooting the computer we will get the Windows error messaging saying Windows recovered from a serious error caused by the video driver. We have gone out and made sure that we have the latest driver and it still happens, but this isn't a deal breaker as far as I am concerned and I would still recommend this video card.
When I find a component brand or type that I like I usually stick with it until I am given a reason to change and as of yet I haven't found any reason to switch from Nvidia based video cards. I am also pretty happy with PNY as a brand; I haven't found any of their products that haven't performed as advertised.
My final recommendation
I would definitely recommend the PNY Geforce 7600GS AGP graphics adapter to anyone looking for a really good gaming card for their PC.
Unleash extreme HD gaming and video on your PC with an nVIDIA GeForce 7600 graphics processing unit (GPU). Featuring the award-winning GeForce 7 Serie...More at Overstock.com
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