Just less than a year ago, we had a look at the nVidia Geforce 7800GT GPU strapped to a couple of XFX cards. At the time it was just shy of being the fastest kid on the block, only being bested by its bigger brother, the 7800GTX. When we looked at how it performed with its twin brother for some SLI action, we found a very balanced compromise between price and speed.

Today we've got our hands on the Geforce 7900GTX sporting 512MB GDDR3 from MSI. Using the latest in transistor manufacturing with its 90nm process, MSI is able to ramp up the clock speed of the chip while keeping power consumption relatively low. At the same time, the memory sees a giant step up in speed in order to keep that bandwidth starved GPU core somewhat satiated.

Singing the Theme to HALO...

With the recently released Geforce 8800 series of GPU's, expect the prices of the Geforce 7 series to start levelling off to much more affordable levels, especially higher end cards like this rabid dog. For those who have been patiently waiting, biding their time, this just might be the droid you are looking for without it costing you a lightsaber an arm.

Today, we check out MSI's NX7900GTX with 512MB of RAM.  Let's see how it performs!