NVIDIA's 8800 Ultra - Pimp my 8800GTX - A bit more history
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 02 May 2007

The next NVIDIA's child was the GeForce 7-series, with quite a few interesting models. At first, we had 7800-cards (110nm process), and then a long stream of 90nm products - 7900, 7600, 7300 with quite a lot of high-end models - 7800GTX, 7800GT, and then 7900GTX, 7900GT, 7900GX2, 7950GX2. Quite the product line. When 7900's came out, 7800's were quickly "behind us" and there it was - an era of quite interesting products from NVIDIA, that's still going on.

The most important part of the 7900 series, as we already mentioned in our (strangely enough) R600 preview was a really, really awesome cooling solution that pretty much marked the end of all of those extremely noisy coolers that made our ears bleed. In a way, even then we thought what we're still thinking - that NVIDIA at least listened to everyone's voice of reason on that part. Results are pretty visible today, as well - it's pretty hard to describe 8800 cards as noisy products, because, simply put - they just aren't. But we're gonna talk about a cooling solution a bit later on.

Somewhere inbetween, there was this short 7800 GTX 512 phase, but we'll stop dwelling on that one. Here's what's important What we considered to be a simple die-shrink (110nm to 90nm) turned out to be a bit more then a die-shrink. As we already mentioned in some of the articles in the past, 24 million little trannie thingies were just gone when 7900GTX came to market (be sure to check this article and, while you're at it, this one, as well), and the card worked flawlessly and faster then the previous ones. This is actually not what happened to 8800 Ultra when compared to 8800 GTX (the transistor count is the same, 681 million), but some of the principles were applied to the chip. The word "optimization" comes to mind..