Customer Reviews

eVGA e-GeForce 7300 GS PCI Express Video Card - 256 MB GPU

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I bought this card because I was in a particular jam. I had to tailor my video card purchase not to my bank account, but to my power supply. The eVGA card was one of the few decent cards that would work with a 250w power supply, which is what my Dell box has. I know the eVGA box says 300w minimum, but their website says 250w. The card works GREAT for Battlefield 2142, the reason I bought the card. I even have the details cranked up to medium and am now seeing things that I didn't see at the low setting. No lag induced by the eVGA video card and again, if you like Battlefield 2142, this is a GREAT, inexpensive way to get into the game

I picked this for the same reason as another reviewer: my very small power supply wouldn't adequately power a big beefy graphics card. This is the only halfway modern card I could find that would run on the weak juice I had to feed it. Unfortunately, thus far the search looks like a wasted effort.

I'm not yet prepared to say it's a dog, because I haven't sat down and tweaked it, reinstalled drivers, and had a chat with the tech people at EVGA (who are actually in the US, and at work 24 hours a day, and are knowledgeable, friendly, and efficient) to try to goose this card up.

But I did benchmark it with 3DMark, both the 2006 and 2005 versions, and I was shocked at the results: off-the-scale slow. Comatose. Flatline. Frame rates of 2 per second. Animation that looked like slide shows. When I posted my results online, I was about 20th from the bottom, out of tens of thousands.

If this is as good as it gets, it's just no good at all, and no better than the cheapo integrated graphics. This is by now an antiquated, midrange-economy model, and my expectations were appropriately low, but this performance still disappointed. The three stars are for the impressive EVGA support, for the reasonable price (the stores are full of even older, lamer cards for higher prices), and for my hope that I may yet make this thing sing.

CONS:

- Fan noise is very loud & irritating, causing me to return the item to Amazon. (This problem was also noted by a reviewer at NewEgg, who returned the item for a video card with passive heating.)
- Did not increase Vista rating for 3D gaming graphics. (I got a Vista rating of 3.0 for 3D graphics, which is the same rating I had before on the same system using the onboard ATI Radeon Xpress 200, which only has 128 MB of shared memory).

PROS:

- Increased Vista rating for Desktop Aero experience from 2.0 to 2.8.

I purchased this card simply to be able to use all the features in Vista. I'd never bothered with a video card before because I don't play video games so what came with the computer is usually enough for me. The card was easy to install and I've had no problems with it. If you are a power graphics/video user this probably won't meet your needs but if you're like me and just need a little more video power for Vista this is a good solution.

If you're a gamer, I'd have to recommend going a little higher than this card -- at least the 7300GT or a 7600+ card -- but I was building a new system and needed a more basic card to casually use with a few games here and there and this fit the bill quite nicely. My previous system had integrated GeForce 6150 and this was a decent step up w/o going overboard for my needs.

My only complaint would be with Amazon's slow delivery of it -- I live 15-20 miles away from Amazon and it took them 5 days to deliver it.

My emachine 3503"s on board video card Radeon 200 express was a bit to be desired after purchaseing the eVGA e-GeForce 7300 GS 256MB PCI-Express 256-P2-N436-LX. and installing then playing the shootout games from the [...]site. The games ran smooth with no lag and the details were great even on my 32"lcd tv display.This is a great 250 meg. pci express card for the buget shopper.

I actually own a compaq computer that I recently bought on amazon: Compaq Presario SR2180NX Desktop PC (Intel Pentium D Processor 820, 1 GB RAM, 250 GB Hard Drive, SuperMulti DVD Drive, Vista Premium).

I really liked the computer out of the box but then I wanted to add a TV tuner so I could use Vista's Media Center. So I added this tuner: Hauppauge-WinTV-HVR-1600 Vista Premium Certified High Definition TV Tuner/PVR

It wasn't too long after adding the tuner that I realized the onboard graphics was not enough to handle HDTV broadcasts while using Vista's Aero Graphics functions. Thats when I decided to add this video card.

It performs in every way that I had hoped. It not only increases the speed of media center, and keep it from crashing for that matter, but it increases the whole overall performance of my Vista PC. There is no extra power supply cables needed to instal it just plugs into the PCI express slot. It works great with my 300 watt power supply that came in the computer. Installing this card only increased my windows experience index from 3.0 to 3.2 with Gaming graphics still being the lowest base score, but the performance increase is obvious. This card also supports dual-monitors but I am not using that function.

With Vista's Aero Graphics, onboard video is not enough. With the price of this card being so good if you're looking to just use a computer for pictures and video and TV then this is your card. Buy it!

Copied from my review at Dell:

Pros: Nvidia has written drivers to allow monitor spanning in Linux. I'm using Ubuntu with Gnome. It took about fifteen minutes of playing around with the nvidia-settings app and my desktop was exactly what I wanted.

Cons: Clearly I upgraded to this card near the end of its life cycle. At the time I bought the computer, It was around a $100 upgrade if I remember correctly. Not worth the $100 then but definitely worth the $50 now. I don't see an appreciable difference in system performance but that's probably because I now have the capacity to work the entire system harder.

Additional Thoughts: To make dual monitor work, you need to search for the best way to install nvidia-settings for your system. Either use apt-get or your package manager. Launch the nvidia-settings from terminal and start playing around. I experimented a few times between running 2 desktops vs twin view but finally settled on the latter. I restarted X a couple of times while experimenting and had one good reboot at the end and I was done.
I have one wide screen at 1400x900 and one 19" at 1280x1024. The wide screen is plugged into the DVI. The settings app has a Left-of and a Right-of setting for positioning the monitors and provides a button to save the configuration to your xorg.conf. The option exists to merge with previous settings which can be handy if you know what you're doing.

I wanted this to watch movies on netflix and it worked for me. So I am happy.

The hardware is like all the cheap products from China. The Vista performance test gave my PC an average rating of 3.0 and the lowest score was awarded to the Graphics sub system, so it's not very good.