Uncovered, Under the Hood (Cont.)

Moving away from the G70 core and HSI bridge which form the processing power of the GeForce 7800 GS, all that needs to be backed by some excellent memory chips. As Samsung has recently made some big progress on high performance graphics memory chips, it comes as no surprise that NVIDIA opted for these speed monsters.

The GeForce 7800 GS comes with eight memory chips in total which are divided amongst the frontside and backside of the board. Each side has four memory chips which are positioned around the G70 GPU. On the frontside these are put next to each other two by two. We would like to point you as well on the power connector, since this is an AGP card some extra power needs to be provided by the power supply.

In total the GeForce 7800 GS features 256MB GDDR3 memory which is running at 1.2GHz, following the reference settings by NVIDIA. In essence that would mean that some decent 1.2ns memory chips would be just fine for the job. However since NVIDIA allows their partners to bring out some overclocked versions, they have opted for some faster Samsung memory chips.

At the backside of the board the memory chips are placed more towards the corners. So why didn't NVIDIA put all memory chips on the same side of the board? Well the only reason that I can see it linked towards the heat that such memory chips would generate. And by splitting these up on both sides of the board the heat can be spread more equally.

Since we already mentioned NVIDIA opted for some fast Samsung chips which are marked as 1.4ns, rated at 1.4GHz. In that way NVIDIA is not exploiting these chips completely when set at 1.2GHz. However, this allows their partners some overclocking room and the ability to release some overclocked versions, like the SuperClock edition. On the SuperClock edition, EVGA has set the memory speed at 1.35GHz and by that putting these memory chips to a better use. Of course, there is still some extra breathing room left, but well we heard that EVGA had some plans to come with a KO SuperClock edition clocked at 490/1400MHz...

Well that's about it on the insights of the EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GS CO SuperClock graphics card, I guess it is time to put this one to work and show some of the performance figures. So we will just reassemble it again, applying some new thermal compound and stick it into our test system.