Introduction:

InnoVISION’s reputation for affordable yet high quality products is simply a reflection of the exceptional image they have set out to establish and maintain.  Inno3D, the graphics division of InnoVISION’s product line delivers high performance graphics, innovative features, and undeniable quality all at an affordable price.

Today’s subject is the 7300GT by NVIDIA and implemented here by Inno3D.  A few months ago we reviewed the 7300GS, the very entry level 7 series card that, while it didn’t do too poorly given its price and target market, it wasn’t a stellar performer in any regard.  After just reading the specs of the GT, it’s clear it’s nowhere near the sluggish nature of the GS, and this just emphasises NVIDIA’s GT and GS naming scheme.

NVIDIA’s 7300GT cards come in many flavours, with manufacturers not being as restrained as they have been in the past when it comes to core clocks, memory clocks and types of memory.  A 7300GT may come equipped with 128MB DDR2 and with core/memory clocks of 350/667MHz respectively.  There is also the option of equipping this GPU with some speedy DDR3 and core/memory clocks at 575/1500MHz respectively.  And that’s pretty much what Inno3D has done.

The review samples received were two Inno3D 7300GT cards with 256MB of DDR3 memory, core clock speeds at a decent 550MHz and memory at a similarly conservative speed of 1400MHz.  The DDR3 version of the 7300GT has stirred a bit of interest since it offers excellent performance at such a reasonable price.  Since the likes of the 7600GT are priced at ~$300AUD plus, it’s no wonder that attention has turned to this card.  The DDR3 version is intended to go up against ATi’s X1600XT, while the DDR2 versions are supposed to compete against the X1300 range of cards. Importantly, NVIDIA have considered Windows Vista with the 7300GT and as such comments that it’s completely Vista compatible.  There’s been a bit of interest in the SLI side of things too, and since we’ve got two of them today, we’ll take a look at SLI.  These cards are priced rather competitively at around $200AUD, which sits them perfectly in the price range of a budget pc builder.

7300GT Specifications

The 7300GT chipset is a very nicely specced GPU indeed, though coming from the same G73 architecture as the 7600 series, you’d expect it to have potential.  The 7300GT may have:

• 8 pixel shaders
• 4 vertex shaders
• 16 shader engines
• 128-bit memory bus
• 128-256MB DDR2/3 memory
• Core clock of 350-575MHz
• Memory clock of 333-750MHz (667-1500MHz DDR)
• SLI (jumper or jumperless) support

All fabricated on a 90nm die with a tidy transistor count of 177 million.  As mentioned earlier, this reviews’ example of 7300GT comes with 256MB DDR3 at 1400MHz, and a core clock of 550MHz.  Since it has the same architecture as the 7600’s, and the 7600’s have 12 pixel shaders, there is of course interest of unlocking the ‘extra’ four pipelines.  Unfortunately, NVIDIA has ensured you cannot do so.

The card also comes with a dual link DVI port, HDTV output and a single link DVI, or analog output, and of course uses the PCI-Express x16 interface

Inno3D 7300GT: a closer look
The Inno3D 7300GT arrived in a rather small box not uncommon to the less expensive, non-performing graphics card market.   This is yet another indicator of increasing performance at lower costs.

A green sticker on the box indicates the specifications of the card inside.

Inside our small box, we find the usual elements in a video cards’ packaging:

• The card itself, in an antistatic bag
• Users manual
• Driver/application CD
• DVI to D-SUB adapter
• S-Video to RCA connector

Inno3D have chosen to give their 7300GT a black pcb which has made its way to many of their previous cards.  It’s not overly big, nor heavy.  We can also see that no external power supply is needed.  Markings on the card confirm it’s GPU and RAM type, and also show that the reference cooler hasn’t been implemented.

The back of the card is fairly non-eventful, though it shows the standard mounting holes should you want to use an aftermarket cooler.

Inno3D have chosen to use their small aluminium heatsink, also not uncommon to previous Inno3D cards.  If you remember our review of the 6600 DDR2, you’ll notice a striking similarity between the cards.  Unfortunately, Inno3D have decided not to use the ramsinks we saw on the 6600 DDR2, however since DDR3 runs much cooler than DDR2, this isn’t much of a loss.

Infineon supply the memory here, using four 1.4ns parts which equates to a maximum frequency of 700MHz.

Dual DVI ports indicate that this card is perhaps towards the upper end of the 7300GT spectrum.  One of these is of course Dual-Link, the other, single.  We can also see here that the cooler is a single slot solution.  The SLI connector is located in the standard location, though the 7300GT can operate in jumperless configuration.

Testing Setup and Notes

For the 7300GT we are doing two things.  Firstly, we will compare single card performance with that of the 7300GS, on the following system:

• AMD Opteron 144 (1.8GHz, 1MB Cache)
• Gigabyte K8N-SLI
• 1GB Geil @ DDR400 (2x512MB, Dual Channel)
• NVIDIA Forceware 91.93
• ASUS 7300GS (128MB, 64-bit DDR2)
• Inno3D 7300GT (256MB, 128-bit DDR3)

This enables us to compare within the low-end range that NVIDIA have produced, and decide what’s good for what and how much of a difference there really is between the two 7300’s.

Secondly, and due to a 1.8GHz processor providing a severe bottleneck for the SLI tests, the Opteron 144 will be overclocked to 2.7GHz, running 300HTT, 3x HTT multiplier and running RAM at 225MHz (DDR450).  So the test system for 7300GT single and SLI benchmarks now becomes:

• AMD Opteron 144 (2.7GHz, 1MB Cache)
• Gigabyte K8N-SLI
• 1GB Geil @ DDR450 (2x512MB, Dual Channel)
• NVIDIA Forceware 91.93
• 2x Inno3D 7300GT (256MB, 128-bit DDR3)

The tests for the 7300GS/GT comparison will be (at 1.8GHz):

• 3Dmark05
• 3Dmark06
• Half Life 2: CS:S and LC stress tests
• Aquamark3

Similarly, for the 7300GT single card and SLI tests (at 2.7GHz), the benchmarks run will be:

• 3Dmark05
• 3Dmark06
• Aquamark3
• Half Life 2: CS:S and LC stress tests
• Doom3 timedemo
• Need for Speed: Most Wanted (Highway 99 & State, 2 minute sprint using FRAPS)

Asus EN7300GS vs. Inno3D 7300GT

In 3dmark05, the GT more than doubles the score of the GS.  The GT enables many of the tests to become more fluid whereas the GS had choppy framerates all round.  This reflects the superior memory bandwidth and features of the GT’s specifications.

It’s clear that the 7300GT dominates the GS once again.  This time, it manages to triple the total score of the GS, and no doubt proves again that it’s not a budget card with budget performance.

The CS:S stress test proves that the GT remains playable at all resolutions, while the GS tends to become sloppy at the higher resolution.  This reflects the GS’s poor memory bandwidth, despite it being able to turbocache itself to 512MB memory.  The GT outperforms the GS by about 100% in both cases, and we believe some CPU limiting occurred for the GT in the lower resolution.

In the final test, which exhibits some HDR lighting and stresses out our GPU’s just that little bit extra, we can see the 7300GS start to falter at even the lower resolutions, while the 7300GT remains strong at both.

It’s clear that the 7300GT is not another low end, budget card.  It’s performance against the 7300GS shows that the GS will remain there for systems that need a cheap add in graphics card, with absolute minimal outlay.  When looking at a bit more performance though, the 7300GS would definitely not be the first choice, while the 7300GT is a sure contender.  So let’s take a look at some single and SLI tests without that CPU limitation in place.

Even at 2.7GHz, the processor was likely bottlenecking the SLI test at minimal settings in Aquamark3.  The results here show that the 7300GT, while of the latest generation of GPU’s, won’t have any trouble running older games.

Gaming tests




The two HL2 stress tests give an idea of how the 7300GT will perform in current games.  Both tests were completed on maximum detail so the only thing varying was the AA and AF settings.  The 7300GT only started to slow down when maximum AA and AF settings were applied, however it still remained playable.  The 7300GT handles HDR lighting extremely well in the Lost Coast demo, which ensures it will be able to play future games with such effects turned on.  With SLI active in these game tests, it can be seen that since the Source engine uses both cards effectively, there is a huge gain to be had.  Unfortunately, our CPU limited the 1280x1024 no AA/AF CS:S test when in SLI mode, though when actually playing CS:S online, framerates were going as high as 250, much more than is needed for smooth gameplay.

Doom 3 showed that, on ultra high quality mode, the game is barely playable at maximum AA and AF settings.  However, on minimum AA and AF it remains at a very decent framerate which indicates that perhaps using middle-ground settings of 4xAA and 8xAF would provide nice graphics without the performance hit.  We can also see here the peculiar effect that SLI has on overall framerate – a decrease in both cases.  However, the decrease is minimal and not uncommon to SLI setups, so we’re not too concerned.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted was a little interesting.  Minimum figures fell below 30FPS in all four areas.  However, when actually playing it, these minimum figures didn’t come into effect much at all.  In both cases of SLI, the game was very smooth and playable, and only with the single card and max AA/AF test was it slideshow gameplay.  There were a few noticeable slowdowns with the max AA/AF SLI test but it remained quite playable.  This is, of course, with all other settings turned on, and as such is quite impressive.

Using the inbuilt temperature monitor in the forceware control panel, the following temperatures were recorded:

Idle: 51C
Load: 72C

Given the size of the cooler on the GPU, this was somewhat to be expected.  It is, however, a little high an idle temperature for a budget card, and the same can be said for the load temperature.  Perhaps somewhere around the 45/65 range of temperatures would be more acceptable.

With regards to overclocking, using coolbits the core and memory frequencies were taken from the default 550/700 to 588/780.  While this is a fair overclock, we feel the high idle and load temperatures were inhibiting the cards from going any further, and with a more adequate cooling solution, the core could have been taken higher.

Don’t let the 7300 name fool you, it’s nothing like the 7300GS variant.  It literally smashed it clean out of the water, in many cases doubling its performance and in some cases, tripling.  When paired up, two 7300GT’s make for excellent performing graphics cards, and is competitive with higher cards of today’s market.  It copes very well with antialiasing and anisotropic filtering sliders at maximum setting, which reflects the fact that a lot of users are now turning to removing the ‘jaggies’ from their games to increase aesthetic appeal and even playability.

With excellent HDR and SM3.0 support, the 7300GT will no doubt be a contender in future game markets, and at such a low price, it’s rather hard to go past.  Our only major gripe with it would be the cooling solution used, however it didn’t pose any problems within normal everyday usage.

It’s hard to find anything else to complain about. The 7300GT DDR3 performs excellently for its price and while it won’t play everything at maximum settings with maximum AA and AF, you’ll get away with conservative AA and AF and still have everything playable.  Just be sure you’re getting the DDR3 version.  An excellent card, at an excellent price, with Windows Vista support too.  NVIDIA have done it again.

The Good:
-Highly specced 7300GT
-DDR3
-SLI (including jumper-less) support
-Single slot HSF
-Reasonable overclocking
-Exceptional performance
-Exceptional price tag
-No external power requirement
-Relatively inaudible cooler
-Dual DVI including one dual-link DVI port
-HDTV and Purevideo support

The Bad:
-Cooler is somewhat lacking

Excellent performance and value – 9/10

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