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Gainward BLISS 7900 GT Golden Sample Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Tuesday, 18 July 2006 |
Spotted on CPU3D is a review on the Gainward BLISS 7900 GT 512MB Golden Sample graphics card. A few weeks ago we checked out the BLISS 7600 GT Golden Sample from Gainward. We thought that it was a decent graphics card that offered great value for money. It performed extremely well and could keep up with some of the high-end cards. Now, we take a look at Gainward's BLISS 7900 GT Golden Sample. The Golden Sample series are basically selected GPU's specially picked by Gainward for use in their graphics cards. In other words, you'll find is that it will overclock better than the ordinary GeForce 7900 cards, and in most cases offers better performance.
 Gainward BLISS 7900 GT Golden Sample Review
The Gainward BLISS 7900 GT Golden Sample sports 512MB of super fast GDDR3 ram running at 1400MHz, with the GPU core running at 550MHz. So in essence it comes with double the amount of memory and a standard overclocked core. The default clock settings of the GeForce 7900 GT from NVIDIA are 450MHz core and 1320MHz memory speed. This is nothing new, manufacturers such as BFG, XFX and Leadtek are already selling overclocked graphics cards at a premium. However, I would much prefer to buy a Golden Sample from Gainward knowing that I have the freedom to overclock the card whenever I want to.
We used the driver extension to overclock the Gainward BLISS 7900 GT Golden Sample. It was good to see that it could overclock, but the gains were negligible. The card was reported to work with a GPU core of 575MHz, and memory at 1580MHz. Quite some increase, although we expected a bit more. However, we only did try the automatic detection method and no manual overclocking was tried. Normally when going for the manual approach some more gain would be gotten on both core and memory. In the end, Gainward's BLISS 7900 GT is indeed a very good card with excellent performance.
As a single card it performs as good as a pair of GeForce 7600 GT and, it actually perform better than a GeForce 7800 GTX. But, the card really come alive in SLI mode. Using two Gainward BLISS 7900 GT's, the performance you get is quite amazing. The whole package is adequate yet attractive. It's difficult to say whether the Gainward BLISS 7900 GT is a good buy or not. Yes, it does offer good performance, and all the gaming benchmarks are good too. But with so many choices now available for high-end cards, I'm worried that the GeForce 7900 GT may not be the card of choice for the enthusiast or hardcore gamer.
The price of the Gainward BLISS 7900 GT is currently around £220, which is okay for what you're getting, considering that the GeForce 7950 GX2 is more expensive and costs around £399. In my opinion, the GeForce 7900 GT is a card that is suitable for the budget conscience gamer. It's mid-way between the GeForce 7600 GT and the GeForce 7950 GX2. The Gainward BLISS 7900 GT Golden Sample is a very good graphics card for the budget conscience gamer, who doesn't want to sacrifice performance over price. However, it might not satisfy the appetites of the enthusiasts or hardcore gamers.
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