Gainward Ultra/3500PCX XP Golden Sample (GeForce 7800GTX)
Gainward Ultra/3500 PCX XP Golden Sample Layout
With the release of new line of boards, Gainward lastly decided to modify the box design. In our view, the matte coating is nice to touch and looks smart enough. The new design of labels and the changed background turns integral into the general conception. Although the exterior of the box does not play the leading part in the overall estimation of the card nor affects the performance, it's always a please to note that the company has done a good job improving its produce in all regards. Now move on to the the package bundle contents.
Package bundle:
- Gainward Ultra/3500 PCX XP Golden Sample video card;
- 2 DVI 15-pin/D-Sub adapters;
- VIVO splitter;
- Adapter for additional power supply;
- Drivers & utilities CD (including EXPERTool and Adobe Acrobat Reader);
- PowerDVD 5 and Muvee AutoProducer3;
- User's Guide.
As we have already stated above, by the exterior the card differs from the GeForce 7800GTX reference sample in only a lid on the cooling system made in corporate colors and Gainward style.
As regards the design of the cooling system itself, it is an aluminum radiator with soldered fins that cools the GPU and four memory chips positioned over the front side of the board. In the upper part of the radiator, there is a heat pipe for more effective cooling of the video memory chips. On the reverse side, there is an aluminum plate that is used for fastening the cooling system.
The power line conditioners are cooled with a separate small aluminum radiator.
On the reverse side, there are the remaining four video memory chips. A separate aluminum plate is used to cool them. The manufacturer used the "jewel steel" for GPU as the thermal interface and thermal spacers for the video memory chips. Note there are more pads for additional video memory chips on the front and reverse sides of the PCB which will be installed on the 512Mb version of GeForce 7800GTX. This solution will soon come to light, in particular, in Gainward's product line.
  The card is equipped with 256 Mb of GDDR3 video memory with a 256-bit data transmission bus assembled of eight Samsung memory chips of 1.6 ns access time. This is equivalent to 625 MHz (1250 MHz DDR) of operating frequency. But as we noted above, the Gainward solution stands out with its video memory frequency increased to 1300MHz. That is, in this case the video memory originally runs at a frequency 50 MHz higher than its nominal. Further on, we'll try to reveal the overclocking capability of the memory on the card in question. We immediately recall the phenomenal overclocking results for video memory on the Gainward PowerPack! video card. Ultra/1960 PCX XP Golden Sample GLH (GeForce 6600GT PCI-E) which took part in our previous NVIDIA SLI Roundup was granted a well-deserved award because two SLI cards showed a superb overclocking of video memory under the standard cooling - as high as 1270(!)MHz DDR.
 Let's look at the GeForce 7800GTX (G70) GPU of revision À2 made on the 20th week of year 2005. The nominal operating frequency is 470MHz, which is 40MHz higher than the 430MHz announced in the specifications. It offers four pixel pipelines, eight vertex units.
In conclusion, note there is one connector for additional power supply
two digital outputs and TV-OUT,
and a connector allowing to merge two Gainward Ultra/3500 PCX Golden Sample video cards into SLI.
The board also supports VIVO features. Philips SAA7115HL is used as the VIVO chip
Now on to the benchmarking.
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