Gainward's 7900GS
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 03 Nov 2006

If we look back at the CeBit launch of 7900 series, the lineup seemed perfect. Two models, spaced enough far apart, were ideal for NVIDIA to cover the different market sections. After 6 months, NVIDIA introduced two additional models, one of which we look at here today. The 7900GS is a cut down version of 7900GT, probably introduced to make use of G71 dies that didn?t have all 24 pipelines operational.After producing chips for six months, NVIDIA made use of the ones that weren?t good enough for 7900GT, but still had 20 or more pipelines. It is a great way to reduce production costs, because those chips are present in production, and it is up to NVIDIA to find a market spot for them. 20 pipelines is still quite enough, as we have seen with previous 7800 series, where the GT version had that much. The reference NVIDIA clocks are basically unchanged from the GT version, 450 MHz for the GPU and 660 MHz for the memory. For the full review of 7900GT check our review from CeBIT.
When we look at Gainward?s vision of a 7900GS card, we see a lot of changes to the original NVIDIA design. Gainward?s card is built around a traditionally red PCB, altough Gainward has changed their package colors to predominantly green. The biggest change is the heatsink, which is now dual slot. It is made of aluminum, but what it lacks in heat conductivity compared to copper ones, it makes up in size. The cooler is accompanied by a large plate with holes, which covers the whole front side of the card, and whose function we still have to figure out.
Gainward has been usually generous with clocks, so the card has a 500/700 MHz clock, compared to the stock 450/660 MHz.
We benchmarked the card using our standard testbed:

AMD Athlon 64 FX-60
ASUS A8N 32
OCZ Platinum rev. 2, 2x512 MB
OCZ GameXtream 700W
Western Digital Raptor HDD

All benchmarks were run in a 1600x1200 resolution, in three modes, no AA, no AF, 4xAA, 16xAF and 8xAA, 16xAF. 3DMark synthetic benchmarks were run with their default resolutions and only with no AA, no AF settings.