Introduction

Its got two doors, 400 horsepower, 400 pound-feet of torque, and is powered by the same LS2 engine used in the Chevrolet Corvette. If you’re an auto buff, chances are you know which car we’re talking about. None other than Pontiac’s GTO.

The Pontiac GTO actually started life out as the Holden Monaro. Holden is basically GM’s performance division down under in Australia. GM stable mate Pontiac imported the Monaro after the Firebird/Trans Am was shelved in 2002. A few changes were made to the basic design – most notably the steering wheel had to be moved a few feet to the left – but the essence of the car was still the same: delivering sheer raw horsepower for not a lot of bucks.

Reviewers loved the GTO’s acceleration (sub 5-second 0-60) and performance, but panned the car for its bland styling, and lackluster handling. It was a great car if you loved horsepower and didn’t want to spend a lot of money, but that’s about it.

The EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GTO

Up top: the X1900 XT and X1950 XTX, bottom: 7900 GTX and 7900 GTO

Now NVIDIA’s got a GTO board of their own, and like the Pontiac GTO it’s an import that has been built to do one thing and one thing well: deliver lots of performance bang for the buck. In fact, lots of you in the FiringSquad Hot Deals forums have been posting tech deals on where you can find the lowest GTO cards in stock!

If you recall our preview of the GeForce 7900 GS and 7950 GT we basically told you that they were derivatives of NVIDIA’s GeForce 7900 GT architecture. The 7900 GS was a detuned 7900 GT designed to appeal the $200 crowd, while the GeForce 7950 GT was a souped-up GeForce 7900 GT priced at $300. They both relied on the same basic GeForce 7900 GT reference board design, although in the case of the 7900 GS four pixel shaders were deactivated and Infineon memory modules were used, while the 7950 GT had none of its shaders deactivated – in fact it ran at higher clocks than the 7900 GT – and used denser 16Mx32 Infineon modules rated for speeds up to 700MHz.

The Radeon X1900 XT and EVGA 7900 GTO

EVGA GeForce 7900 GTO and the Radeon X1950 XTX

The GeForce 7900 GTO on the other hand is a derivative of NVIDIA’s faster GeForce 7900 GTX. The 7900 GTO is built on the same board design and cooling as the GeForce 7900 GTX, in fact the exact same 7900 GTX graphics chip is used on the GTO: both GPUs are clocked at 650MHz. The key difference is that the GTO’s 512MB of memory runs at slower speeds than the GeForce 7900 GTX, just 660MHz (1.32GHz effective), which is the same speed as the GeForce 7900 GS and GT. In comparison, the memory on the GeForce 7900 GTX runs at 800MHz (1.6GHz effective).

The following chart summarizes the differences between the various NVIDIA GPUs, and how they stack up to ATI’s offerings:

GPU Comparison
	GeForce 7900 GTX	GeForce 7900 GTO	GeForce 7950 GT	GeForce 7900 GT	GeForce 7900 GS	Radeon X1900 XT 256MB	Radeon X1900 GT	Radeon X1800 GTO
Core Clocks	650	650	550	450	450	625	575	500
Pixel Shaders	24	24	24	24	20	48	36	12
Vertex Shaders	8	8	8	8	7	8	8	8
Texel Fill-rate (Mtexels/s)	15600	15600	13200	10800	9000	10000	9200	6000
ROPs	16	16	16	16	16	16	12	12
Effective Memory Clock	1600	1320	1400	1320	1320	1450	1200	1000
Memory Bandwidth (GB/s)	51.2	42.2	44.8	42.2	42.2	46.4	38.4	32