What Lies Beneath? Gainward Uncovered...

Time to dig a bit deeper... And see what lies beneath the cooling system of the Gainward BLISS 7800 GS+ Silent graphics accelerator. We are taking a look under the hood by pulling of the cooling solution. As you know by removing the cooling system you are voiding the warranty. For those who don't care about the warranty and want to see what's underneath, with proper handling the heatsink can be removed for what ever reasons. We don't recommend it however.

Once the screws have been removed, the heatsink can be taken of and the full scale PCB sees the light. The main weight of the video card actually comes from the cooling solution, which is based upon the popular Silencer series of Arctic Cooling. Most electronic components have been invisible from the start on the front side of the PCB. Only some smaller components were not covered by the heatsink. All other main components like the GPU, voltage regulators and memory chips however can only be seen once the cooling solution was taken off.

The Gainward BLISS 7800 GS+ Silent is powered by the G71 series line of graphics processors, set at 450MHz clock speed. The G71 version on the BLISS 7800 GS+ Silent is physically the same chip as the one used on the GeForce 7900 GT and GTX released earlier. The G71 chip uses a 90nm manufacturing process for its high performance circuits, which eradicate limitations with both frequencies and higher heat dissipations. As you might already know, the G71 is a highly optimized version of the previous G70 chip and comes with 24 pipelines. Notice as well that the GPU die is protected against damage with a soft rubber frame, this to prevent pressure damage from the heatsink.

The Gainward BLISS 7800 GS+ Silent comes with eight memory chips in total which are all located on the front side of the board. The memory chips are placed strategically around the G71 core. Each of these memory chips gives their heat away to the coolers copper sole via elastic rubber-like thermal pads. By cooling the memory chips on their own, it provides extra protection towards the lifetime of the chips in general and also comes in handy for the overclockers amongst us.

When looking at the Gainward BLISS 7800 GS+ Silent, we notice that it features 512MB GDDR3 memory which is running at 1.25GHz. In essence that would mean that some decent 1.6ns memory chips would be just fine for the job. However since Gainward has opted for faster GDDR3 Infineon memory chips. These Infineon GDDR3 chips come marked as 1.4ns access time and are therefore rated at 1.4GHz frequency and operating at 2.0V. Being set at only 1.25GHz this leaves quite some margin for some overclocking, due to being rated at default for 1.4GHz operation...

On top of that Gainward had to equip their BLISS 7800 GS+ Golden Sample AGP board with a HSI bridge to convert the native PCI Express chip functions into an AGP compatible signal. Since the G71 cores are native PCI Express chips the HSI bridge is essential to translate the PCI Express signals towards the AGP interface. The HSI bridge chip is nothing new, as it has been extensively used on the GeForce 6 series to convert from PCI Express to AGP and vice versa. The chip is also protected by a rubber frame to withstand the pressure of the copper heatsink cooler.