Gainward Bliss 7300 GT Golden Sample

How we tested

With the pure speed of cards out on the market at the moment I tend to focus on gameplay in my reviews. I will play each of the test suite games on as high settings as I could possibly play them at while maintaining a frame rate that is enjoyable to play at. If the quality of the gaming looks the same at different settings then I will choose the setting with the best FPS. This differs from game to game and person to person but I play a lot of games and have played with a lot of graphics cards so I hope that I can impart a decent opinion.

With this card I am going to try to get the optimal res of most low-mid range TFT’s: 1280 x 1024. If this cannot be achieved then I will get the highest settings possible

To offset this angle I also run a test suite of 3dMark03, 05 and 06. These will give you some numbers on what the cards perform like at stock speeds, for comparison. I also ran 3dMark06 after overclocking the cards – to see how much of an effect the overclocking will make. Overclocking is usually performed using the coolbits registry hack and done as in This Thread from the OC3D forums. On this occasion I was not able to do this – the coolbits registry hack did not work. Instead I fired up Gainward’s “Expert Tool” and used that.

As this is a low end card I used one of OC3D’s low end test setups to bench it.

Hardware:

AMD 64 3200+ Venice (Stock 2.0GHz)
Abit AT8 32x 939 Motherboard
1gb (2 x 512mb) OCZ Platinum Rev 2 2-2-2-5
160gb Hitachi deskstar SATA drive
Onboard HD Audio
AMD Heatpipe cooler
Antec P180B (Fans on medium cooling)

Using nVidia Forceware 91.31

Gainward Bliss 7300GT Golden sample 256mb Clock Speed: 400. Memory Speed: 750 (325)