Unless you take particular pleasure in following the ins and outs of product manufacturing, XpertVision will be a new name to you. It's a brand of Palit, which might also be unknown to you, but has in fact been making graphics cards for companies such as Gainward for several years. XpertVision and Palit are now vying for the limelight, and their GeForce 7900 GS cards (their products are identical) are some of the cheapest available.
Cheap though it was, our review sample certainly wasn't plain. Nvidia's predilection for green PCBs has been ignored; the XpertVision's PCB is bright red, making it look more like an ATi product. If you're fiercely partisan when it comes to your graphics cards then this may be nothing short of blasphemy.
The card is cooled by a dual-slot heatsink and fan. The HSF's chunky aluminium fins are angled to guide airflow over the RAM chips. While the fan doesn't come close to the quiet operation of the Arctic Cooling Acceleros, the whine it generates under load isn't as high-pitched or annoying as that of Nvidia's reference cooler for the GeForce 7900 GS.
In line with the budget nature of the card, the Nvidia stock speeds haven't been altered - the GPU is set at 450MHz, while the GDDR3 memory runs at 660MHz (1.32GHz effective). The XpertVision is cheaper than any other GeForce 7900 GS cards we've seen, as they were all pre-overclocked. However, it has the same GPU as pricier cards - a powerful piece of DX9 silicon, with 20 pixel processors, 16 ROPs and 7 vertex pipes. What's more, our test sample has 512MB of RAM - double that of a normal GeForce 7900 GS.
Having said that, we're unsure whether it's worth having 512MB of memory on a mid-range card, as it currently only benefits games that have special '512MB-only' high-detail modes. In our experience, these modes rarely offer any tangible graphical improvement.
The extra memory certainly didn't give the card a performance boost in our tests. All the GeForce 7900 GS cards we've reviewed have been capable of playing our test games at 1,280 x 1,024, but the XpertVision's frame rates were much lower than the pre-overclocked 7900 GS cards that we've seen previously. While XFX's GeForce 7900 GS XXX (see Issue 40, p50) can handle some games, such as F.E.A.R., at 1,680 x 1,050 , the XpertVision looked less than rock-solid at this resolution. With its lower clocks, the XpertVision barely managed a playable frame rate in F.E.A.R., returning a minimum frame rate of 26fps, while the XFX managed a smoother minimum of 32fps.
Thankfully, our review sample proved to be a remarkable overclocker. We increased the GPU to 618MHz, which is only slightly slower than the 626MHz the XFX managed. The XpertVision's memory was also willing to stretch its legs, although we had to call it a day at 706MHz (1.41GHz). Needless to say, however, after this overclock, the XpertVision was itching for a rematch with its pricier foes. The hefty overclock, combined with the latest ForceWare graphics drivers from Nvidia, allowed the card to almost match the performance of the XFX. The average frame rate at 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x AA and 2x AF in F.E.A.R. rose from 63fps to a healthy 79fps, just 5fps short of the XFX's score. This also made the XpertVision more comfortable at 1,680 x 1,050 with 2x AA and 8x AF, although, as with all GeForce 7900 GS cards, Prey was too much for the XpertVision at these settings.
XpertVision GeForce 7900GS