Further Down the GX2 Board (Cont.)

Moving on to the other side of the card can be a bit less spectacular as there is not so much to see. However we will try to uncover as much as possible so give you some impressions. All the major components are brought to the front of the card so the back side will only reveal some minor parts like electronic interconnections and resistors.

Upon checking the back it doesn't differentiate that much from a normal GeForce 7900 GTX based graphics card. The card is just a bit bigger in terms of length. As with all NVIDIA based video cards, the back is quite plain and simple, with just the smaller components like resistors, chips and regulators. And of course the soldering point of the components that have been placed on the front of the PCB.

So what else can be found on the back side of the GX2 card? Well each component with some importance that can be seen on the front see will have some pinouts to the back. On the PCB we spotted the position of the GPU itself, the G71 chip. This one is outlined by a rounded X-shaped white line with on each end a screw. These screws will hold the main core heatsink in place. Around that we can see soldering point and electronic circuitry of the additional chip that will act as splitter of some sort for the PCI Express interface.

The next concentration of tiny resistors and pinouts come from the memory chips used. These memory chips are coming as pairs and in total there are four pairs, per PCB that is. Each PCB is equipped with eight Samsung ram chips, which provide 512MB frame buffer per GPU. As with the other GeForce 7900 series these are placed strategically around the core. The outer PCB is a bit more different as some kind of circular holes are present. My only guess would be that the efficiency of the enclosed cooling fan isn't as optimal as it should. To compensate this NVIDIA has foreseen these holes so that the fan can extract enough air to exhaust over the cooling heatsink.

The outer PCB features the PCI Express interface connection of the GeForce 7900 GX2. So a normal SLI enabled mainboard will be able to work with the GX2 in single or SLI mode, so actually dual-SLI and quad-SLI mode. Each of the boards has one SLI connection at the top, so in case of Quad SLI you will need two SLI connectors to connect both GX2 cards together. As a results each GPU will communicate via a ring-like topology to enable the Quad SLI functionality.

The PCB's on the GeForce 7900 GX2 are hold together with several bolts. This will make sure that both boards remain at the same distance at every point and that both are firmly attached to each other. So imagine tearing through today's most advanced PC games with an unheard of 48 gigapixels per second of raw graphics performance, 6 teraflops of compute power, 96 pixel pipes and an astounding 2GB of on-board graphics memory.