eVGA Nvidia GeForce 7900 GT Signature Series Graphic Card

I decided to give this eVGA 7900GT Signature Series card a try to replace my aging system which had an XFX 6800 GT. The card's performance was astonishing right away, but almost immediately I experienced CTDs (crash to desktop), BSODs and artifacting in all games, even older games. I decided to RMA the card, but had exactly the same issues. At the time, 84.21 was the latest WHQL driver release form nVidia. But when 91.31 came out, all of the aforementioned issues went away. These issues are consistent; a perusal of eVGA's forum for the SS card will prove it. The card just doesn't seem stable with 84.21 driver. This may be a moot point since 91.31 is out, but I fear what future driver releases may do.

This card performs amazingly well, but has only 256 MB of texture memory. This suffices for the current lineup of games, but already some games have options which utilize more than 256 MB of textures (Oblivion, Doom 3, etc.). I wish that I had gone with a 7900GTX instead, which has 512 MB of video memory.

What amazed me other than the performance was the factory heat sink and fan. The GPU sink and RAM sinks are one contiguous piece of copper, no aluminum garbage. I was prepared to put my Zalman VGA cooler on when I received the card, but the factory cooling works so well, I kept it. 40 C idle and in the 50s C load. Not bad considering that this is a volt-modded 7900 GT with extremely high clocks.

The packaging is enormous: aprroximately 2' wide, 1.5' long, 3" high. Not really a bad point, but interesting to note.

All Signature Series owners have their own personal support hotline, which has competent techs who are very quick to answer the phone.

In conclusion, save just a bit more and get a 7900 GTX. But if you can spare it, this card will not cease to amaze now that stable drivers exist for it.