I am not someone who is generally finding himself in need of hardcore, high-end video cards. Still, it the cards being reviewed are in the price range for heavy gamers all over the place. Therefore it might pay to be up on the latest…

It used to be a reference card world.

In the past, most graphics cards were boringly similar. Sure, a few companies like BFG might offer cards that are slightly overclocked, but for the most part, cards were essentially reference board designs, shipping at reference clock rates.

Some time last year, Nvidia began loosening the reins a bit, allowing board makers more leeway with core and memory clock frequency settings. Now, most manufacturers have a two-tier strategy at the high end, with a conservative reference board design shipping at one price, and a board pushed about as hard as it can go, costing more.

The pricing can be substantially more. The eVGA GeForce 7900 GTX Superclocked we look at today costs $80 more (MSRP) than the company’s reference board design ($499 versus $579). That’s a 16% price difference for a 6% core frequency and a 10% memory clock difference. In the real world, pricing differences may be greater due to product shortages. Since the companies have to sort the GPUs to pick the cream of the crop to run at these higher clock rates, availability can become an issue.

It’s mostly a reference card world with ATI graphics cards. We’ve heard that ATI may be giving its OEMs more freedom, but it’s unclear whether that will do them much good, if our experience with the ASUS EAX1900XTX is any indication.

With these thoughts in mind, let’s take a look at our three contenders….. Source: ExtremeTech

[tags]oem,asus,evga geforce 7900,ati graphics card[/tags]