It has been some time since Nvidia's 7900 GTX made its way to retail and whilst newer and faster products have been released, this means prices of the older cards drop. Obviously the lower the prices fall the more attractive the card becomes and so today we are going to take a look at two of the best 7900 GTX packages to see how well they perform with the latest games.

MSI

MSI's 7900GTX follows Nvidia's reference design, which is by no means a bad thing to do. By following the reference design MSI have been able to incorporate the standard cooling solution. The cooler can be clearly seen in the picture below, it runs the length of the card and features an 85mm fan in the middle which passes air across the two sets of aluminum cooling fins and heat pipes. Out of the current high end cards this is by far our favorite stock cooler as it is almost silent.

Underneath the heat sink the MSI 7900GTX features the G71core, a 0.09micron chip, running at 650Mhz. The other important specification is that the card comes with 512mb of DDR3 running at 1.6ghz.

Below is the side view of the cooler, it is a dual slot design and to the top left of the picture is the 6-pin power connector which is required for operation.

Flipping the card round we can see the PCI express bracket which features two dual link DVI outputs and a HDTV output for those who want to feed the video signal to their TV.

Many companies skimp on the bundle provided in order to keep costs down, however MSI is not one such company. Once you open the rather high class looking box you find a plentiful collection of extras.

The extras included feature a Power cable, DVI>VGA connector, TV out cables, sticker, manuals, driver and even a free game (King Kong) allowing almost immediate access to high quality graphics on the 7900 GTX.