Review: Leadtek Winfast A7300 GT TDH

The new Winfast A7300 GT TDH from Leadtek features is aimed at those looking for a budget graphics card for their pre-PCI Express computer.

Aesthetically speaking, it's very bland and certainly won't do anything to enhance cases with see-through panels. The card isn't silent but a small GPU fan only makes a slight hum.

It features eight pixel pipelines ticking over at 400MHz - a higher clock than most other 7300GT cards - and 256MB of 700MHz DDR2 Ram.

A dual-link DVI-I port allows for resolutions up to 2,560x1,600 (should your monitor allow it), and sits alongside a single VGA and an S-video port.

On our test system (3.73GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, 1GB Ram), the Leadtek card scored 3,135 in 3Dmark05. This is fractionally below what a 7300GT using the PCI Express bus would achieve (around 3,300) and is similar to ATI Radeon X700 and X800GT cards we've tested, but higher than what a Radeon X600 and plain Nvidia Geforce 6600 (not the GT variants) is capable of.

In real-world game tests we measured 65fps (frames per second) in Far Cry and Doom3, while Unreal Tournament 2004 ticked away at 135fps. Turning on 4x anti-aliasing (AA) to smooth out edges saw performance drop to 43fps in Far Cry, 39fps in Doom3 and 117fps in Unreal Tournament 2004 - still playable, but only just.

By increasing the resolution to 1,280x1,024, frame rates decreased to 54fps in Far Cry, 49fps in Doom3 and 118fps in Unreal Tournament 2004. Turning on 4xAA at this resolution saw frame rates in all games other than Unreal Tournament 2004 drop below 30fps, making gaming an uncomfortable experience.

Check out our benchmarking website to see all our graphics card test results.
This is a good card for those who regularly run games at 1,024x768 - it has just enough basic grunt to squeeze out a good gaming experience at this resolution.

However, it's worth bearing in mind that Leadtek's AGP 7600GS card, with 12 pixel pipelines, instead of the eight on this model, will be able to handle 1,280x1,024 resolutions more comfortably and can be bought for just £10 more. We'd therefore recommend spending the extra money and plump for the 7600GS.

Also consider:
Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro AGP
Give your AGP system a new lease of gaming life

Gigabyte GV-NX88S640H-RH
Plenty of power for your money with this high-end graphics card

ECS N8800GTX-768MX
One of the fastest graphics card we've tested, but you'll need a similarly fast CPU

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