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Gainward BLISS 7800 GS 512MB AGP Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Friday, 28 April 2006 |
TechArray shares a review on the Gainward BLISS 7800 GS 512MB AGP graphics card. Ever since the industry switched to PCI Express graphics cards AGP users have watched as compatible components with the aging interface have slowly dried up. While the death of AGP is inevitable Gainward intends to provide support until the bitter end. The GeForce 7800 GS isn't exactly new, it has been shipping for a little over a month now, Gainward however brings something different to the table. Even though it shares the same GeForce 7800 GS moniker it is more closely related to the GeForce 7800 GT. And that because the chip used on the GS is in fact the GT version.
 Gainward BLISS 7800 GS 512MB AGP Review
The latest AGP based cards are made possible by NVIDIA's bridge chip, it allows an AGP card to run on a PCI Expres bus and when you reverse the chip it lets a PCI Express card run on an AGP bus. The internal communication bus of the GeForce 7800 GT is in fact meant for PCI Express so Gainward has employed this bridge chip to bring you their version of the GeForce 7800 GS. Gainward goes the extra mile here and provides a cooler based on the Arctic Cooling Silencer line, famous for their low temperatures all while being nearly inaudible. Enthusiasts pay around $40 for coolers like this, keep that in mind.
The standard GeForce 7800 GS is a partially disabled GeForce 7800 GTX, NVIDIA has opted to disable 8 of the 16 ROPs, 2 vertex shaders have been disabled leaving 6, the 24 pixel shaders have been cut down leaving 16 and last but not least the GPU clock has been reduced to 375MHz. We saw that 430MHz is standard for the GTX and the memory speed has been unchanged from 1.2GHz. Gainward's spin of the GeForce 7800 GS is clocked at 425MHz for the core and 1.2GHz for the RAM but the twist here is that it has 20 pixel pipelines. Gainward also packs on 512MB of GDDR3 instead of the default 256MB.
Gainward definitely has a winner on its hands. The GeForce 7800 GS line of cards breaths yet another breath of life into the AGP platform but I have to wonder how many more AGP cards we are going to see in the future. At roughly $450 this card is far from cheap. PCI Express cards with far better performance cost less than this card so while AGP users have a new performance leader for their interface it is bitter sweet to say the least.
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