The BLISS 7800 GS+ 512MB AGP Silent

The Gainward BLISS 7800 GS+ Silent follows the mindset of the GeForce 7800 GT and GTX. It is a good looking card with outstanding performance and comes in a dual slot design. The cooler isn't deducted from the reference design from NVIDIA, but is based upon the very successful Silencer series designed by Arctic Cooling. The main difference related to the GeForce 7800 GT and GTX is the interface; whereas the GT and GTX are PCI Express based cards the GeForce 7800 GS is all about the AGP connection.

The full blown Gainward BLISS 7800 GS+ Silent looks impressive. The actual PCB is almost completely hidden away behind the dual slot cooling solution. Peeking out at the bottom we see the AGP interface connection. On top of the cooler, or better the cooling exhaust displays the Gainward brand making sure that we all know it is a Gainward product. It is rather interesting to see a dual slot cooling on the GeForce 7800 GS, as the reference design by NVIDIA comes with a single slot cooling solution. Although such a cooler following the Arctic Cooling line of products does stand for silent operation and some reasonable overclocking potential.

	GeForce 7800 GS	GeForce 7800 GT	GeForce 7800 GTX
Core	375MHz	400MHz	430MHz
Memory	1200MHz	1000MHz	1200MHz
Pipelines	16	20	24

The table above shows where to situate the GeForce 7800 GS products according to NVIDIA's design. When looking at the processing power of the GeForce 7800 GS you may notice that with only 16 pipelines it would mean a downgraded GeForce 7800 GT. And that it's in fact when it comes down to the numbers. From that perspective the GeForce 7800 GS is leaning closer to the GeForce 6800 GT, which is also featuring 16 pixel pipelines. However, it is a different story when looking at the BLISS 7800 GS+ Silent, which comes with a G71 core and the full blow 24 pixel pipelines. That alone will leave the default GeForce 7800 GS far behind in term of raw performance and gaming experience.

It's important to note that Gainward does clock their BLISS 7800 GS+ Silent board a bit higher than the reference GeForce 7800 GS AGP card by NVIDIA. The Gainward version it's completely different from the NVIDIA reference board, and is more leaning towards the GeForce 7900 GT design, as a result Gainward just couldn't just leave the card hanging with the reference speeds and thus increased these slightly.

	GeForce 7800 GS+	GeForce 7900 GT	GeForce 7900 GTX
Core	425MHz	450MHz	650MHz
Memory	1250MHz	1320MHz	1600MHz
Pipelines	24	24	24

This is actually some good news as that proves that Gainward has been innovative and in combination with the G71 core which is used to power the GeForce 7900 GT and GTX graphics card becomes a quite interesting product for the gaming performance enthusiasts. That would also mean that Gainward has gone one step further than NVIDIA and left the old G70 core for what its worth and immediately jumps to the optimized and redesigned G71 core, to deliver that extra bit of raw power. Way to go Gainward!

The rear view is quite sober and resembles to the GeForce 7900 series. It does show almost all the details off the PCB. The only part that is covered, as the back side of where the GPU core is located and is used to keep the dual slot cooling in place. We won't find any memory chips at the back, as we have seen on the standard GeForce 7800 GS video cards. The memory chips, located on the front, are clocked at 1.25GHz on the Golden Sample edition, so some proper cooling is certainly an added value.