|  Articles | Gainward Geforce 7800GTX Review | Gainward Geforce 7800GTX Review | Gainward Geforce 7800GTX Review
The Card
Impressive looking card, the card is about 2 cm longer than the 6800
Ultra.
The 7800GTX requires more power than the PCI-E slots 75W of power can
output.
A nice view of the card for your
viewing pleasure
The dual DVI and S-video output
Did I mention its a big card?
Here you can see that the Gainward 7800GTX is slightly longer than the
Gainward AGP 6800GT and a bit thinner too.
Installation
Installing the card was not a problem what so ever, but do keep in
mind, if you have a drive cage with 2 hard drives in it, then it might
be a problem installing the card due to the length of it.
The ExperTool
The Expert tool is a utility for your Gainward Graphic card. You can
see the complete system information as well as change the resolution
with just a click. The most important thing is that you can run the
card in enhanced mode, in other words at 480/1300 under warranty from
Gainward.
You can also set the clock speed of your Gainward 7800GTX to their safe
mode setting. This option will lower your clock speed to 440/1250 and
still being faster than the reference 7800GTX. To be honest why would
anyone want to lower the clock speed when this card is meant to run at
480/1300?
Where did that come from??
Speaking of clock speeds Hilbert from Guru 3D discovered that the
reference 7800GTX did clock it self 40 MHz higher, meaning the core was
at 470 MHz but the memory speed remained the same. This is also true
with the Gainward 7800GTX Golden Sample, it actually does clock the
core to 520 MHz while the memory remains at 1300 MHz. This still means
the Gainward 7800GTX is the fastest air-cooled 7800GTX there is. Bit
tech did an interview with the nVidia chief scientist David Kirk to
shred some light on this issue.
"Its somewhat hard for us to say
the core clock in G70 is this single number", says Kirk. "We didnt
want to be accused of exaggerating the clock speed, so we picked a
conservative number to talk about the core clock speed. But, yes, that
is just one of the multiple clocks."
We asked David what the three visible
clocks did (thats the ROP clock, pixel clock and geometry clock if
youre still playing catchup). "Youre making the assumption theres
only three clocks," was his cryptic reply. "The chip is large - its
300m transistors. In terms of clock time, its a long way across the
chip, it makes sense for different parts of the chip to be doing things
at different speeds."
What of the speculation that certain
parts of the chip only overclock in multiples of more than 1MHz,
appearing to restrict overclocking? "Well, the chip is actually better
for overclocking, since its so low-power and low-heat," Kirk tells us.
"Were going to have to work with the guys at RivaTuner, because it
could be that it makes sense for overclocking tools only to offer
options that are really going to give a performance benefit, rather
than letting users hunt around for the best combinations and multiples
that work. Because of the way the chip works, it makes sense for
different parts to be working in multiples."
Overclocking
Considering the Gainward 7800GTX is already overclocked I didn’t
have high hopes of overclocking it too much. This card overclocked
better than I expected, I was able to reach a
core speed of 515 MHz and 1400 MHz on the memory. Running some
intensive benchmarks at that speed, minor artefacts appeared. By
reducing the core to 510 MHz things where a lot better. The card ran
100% stable at that speed without artifacts. The memory
modules on the Gainward 7800GTX Golden Sample are 1.6ns and 1400 MHz
was the fastest and most stable speed I could manage. According to Riva
tuner the card runs at 551/1404 MHz, now thats very impressive clock
speed. At that speed the Gainward Golden Sample 7800GTX shows what pure
power is all about.
Here at the speed of 510/1400 or at 551/1404 the core temperature stays
around 73-75c.
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