Verdict: Okay for HD movies, but forget about gaming.

Costing £40, and with a PCB only half the size of a small card such as the 7600 GT, it's safe to say that the 7300 GS is the runt of Nvidia's 7-series litter. The card justifies its name thanks to its ability, on paper at least, to support the same DirectX 9c, Shader Model 3 effects and HDR lighting as its bigger 7-series siblings; unfortunately, however, this is where the similarities end.

With only four pixel processors, three vertex pipes and a meagre complement of just two ROPs, it almost goes without saying that, unless your gaming ambitions end with Football Manager or Quake II, the 7300 GS won't be powerful enough to play your games.

There are two versions of the 7300 GS, one with 128MB of on-board memory and another with 256MB. Both variants also support TurboCache, which, despite its fast-sounding name, is in fact the slow technique of pilfering system memory when the on-board RAM proves to be insufficient. A 64-bit memory interface, coupled with 400MHz (800MHz effective) memory, ensures that the card has very little memory bandwidth, especially when compared with the gargantuan 512-bit memory interface found on ATi's new Radeon HD 2900XT. The 7300 GS GPU runs at 550MHz.

Perhaps the only use for this card would be to play DVDs in a media PC. The 7300 GS supports H.264 decoding, so it can assist with the playback of movies from an HD-DVD or Blu-ray disc. That said, the 7300 GS doesn't support dual-link DVI, so it isn't compatible with very high-resolution displays.

We might not be so harsh on the 7300 GS if Nvidia were more forthcoming about its capabilities. The 7300 GS clearly isn't designed for gaming, and would only be useful for media PCs. However, Nvidia suggests that the 7300 GS provides 'the performance you need to play the latest games'. Having tested the 7300 GS in three modern games, we can assure you that it doesn't. You can get similar performance from motherboards with integrated graphics, which makes the 7300 GS appear fairly superfluous.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
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