Okay, here's my review for this special budget video card. To those guys and girls who want to play some newer games at a decent settings without killing performance (and without busting out your wallet), this card is for you. What are the specs? Already overclocked - 500/700MHz (effective 500/1400MHz) Core/Memory clock. A plain Geforce 7300GT with DDR2 is only 350/500 (or 350/350) if I'm not mistaken. Heatsinked RAM and good Zalman cooler on the main chip. Based on the newer G73 core, 90nm ones. Contains high-quality Japanese capacitors - Nichicon. The test? Remember to set the 'Application controlled only' for AA, AF and also V-sync in the nVidia Control Panel for 3D settings. Also the 'Image Settings' must be only 'Quality' since the 'High Quality' never make any difference at all except performance hit. Can play most games recommended for Radeon 9550 - smoothly and with high-details. Bloodrayne 2, SWAT 4 series and others did very well on this card. Attention:All of the games are played using 1024x768 resolution. FEAR - Since this card is only 128MB - the texture resolution must have to be forced into 'Medium'. Soft shadows and other extra lighting features must be tuned down to 'medium' or 'low' for optimal performance. Water resolutions and reflections must be only 'Medium'. The rest of it is fine, and it will depend on the computer for the Physics settings. AA must be on 2x for optimal framerates. Half-Life 2 - Very good on maxed out settings. AA must be around 4x and the AF is 2x and vice versa. For the Episode One - be careful of the "Shader" settings though - it kills the maximum framerates, but still smooth and playable. Doom 3 - All maxed out - a very good one with only AA must be 4x. Very good, I can summarize that. Farcry - All maxed out like Doom3 too, AA - 4x. Haven't tried 8x, but it'll work fine too. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter - Don't ever try this card on that game - you might need a Physics card, or else the performance will be much screwed. Please play this on a 8800 because it contains that module. These are the major games that I tried on the card with 1024x768 resolution. This card works best on this resolution, any higher than that that card will surely complain. Summary: Pros: Good budget card in a very cheap price and can play most newer games at high or medium-high settings in decent framerates in a resolution of 1024x768. Excellent cooling system for overclocked card, only 40~44 degrees idle and 48 degrees in load. Also, you can use this card for a high-end mini home theatre PC. Great and stylish packaging. And SLI compatible too. Beats the Radeons X1300 and X1600 at a lower price tag. Really balanced price : performance ratio. Cons: I can only find PCI-E versions of this card, and only 128MB of video RAM. Not really good at higher resolutions if you are having a huge LCD monitor. Shoddy manual book. AA and AF is only tuned to around 2~4x for optimal framerates. Must use drivers obtained from the CD to overclock the card - driver updates for this card will be very difficult. In a nutshell: If you are a hard-core gamer and price is no boundaries to you - better get some other card like the 7900GTs. If you are gaming on a serious budget, this card will work wonders to you. You save lotsa money on that card. Really. Oh, the price is around RM300~350.
Nice review! Yeah, the GeForce 7300 GT is a really great budget gaming card, especially the GDDR3 model.
Nice review One thing though... The 7300GT is not really capable of running higher resolutions anyway... regardless of the memory size.
Thanks. The card can still run okay at a little bit higher resolutions than the 1024x768. But trying a 1600x1200 is really not good for the card. But anyway, still many games are preferred to be played at 1024x768 so this is the great card for gaming-starters, and people who only have 17" monitors and not really bother to push the resolutions to the max. I have to add some major games though: Hitman: Blood Money - All maxed out except turning off the 'Post-filter' which is actually beating up the card badly. Rest of them is fine. Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory - All maxed out. Runs glidingly smooth without any (sign of) hitch at all. Need for Speed Carbon - I haven't tried this game on that card yet - but I tried it on my friend's friend's Colorful 7300GT with DDR2 - I'm sure if I play it in my comp I can able to only turn off the 'Blur mode when speeding' and turn off 'Full reflections on car and roads'. Make sure these are only put 'Medium'. I haven't tried any SLi on this card yet because I haven't got another to try it with and I don't have SLi compatible board for me to play with. edit: Overclocking could be much restricted because it's already overclocked. and also, WARNING, please do not ever attempt to Volt-mod this card, it'll hurt the card! I never tried that, and it'll not be good to overvolt anything without a proper reason.
For the begineers and newbies to overclocking, it's better to leave the volt-jumper alone. Voltmodding it will make the computer refuse to start, and also worse of all, it might be heating up the graphics card. If you have a good cooling solution to this, you can try that. Meanwhile there are some little overclock tool in the nVidia control panel - you can tune it a little bit more and see how it'll go.
