Test Rig Configuration

Now that we have a good impression of the Gainward BLISS 7800 GS+ Silent video card it is time to check out the performance delivered by this card. The system used will be our somewhat older, though still very decent and major overclockable Intel P4 based test rig supporting the AGP8x interface. The system is build around the ASUS P4P800 Deluxe which forms a stable and flexible base during our benchmark run. This is one of the best proofed systems with excellent support for AGP based graphics cards. So check out the specifications...

• Intel Pentium 4 (Prescott) 3.0GHz Processor
• ASUS P4P800 Deluxe Mainboard
• OCZ EB DDR PC-4000 2x 1024MB Platinum Edition Memory
• Gainward BLISS 7800 GS+ (G71) 512MB AGP
• 1x Maxtor Diamond Max 9 200GB IDE HDD (UDMA133)
• Plextor PX-130A DVD-ROM Drive
• Hiper Type-R HPU-4B580 (580W) Power Supply
• Cooler Master ATC-200C Computer Case
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional incl. SP2 Edition

The ASUS mainboard is based around the Intel 865PE chipset. Of course ASUS is known to be a leader when it comes in overclocking and supporting more extra features out of the box. When we test VPU/GPU's, we use rigs that are in production and used daily, so you get a better idea of performance under a typical configured home used computer, we leave all our processes running and do not super tweak the platform to yield scores that might only happen with this test system.

Additional Specifications

First we will grab some information from Everest Ultimate Edition and get some feedback on the video card sub system. Lavalys was nice enough to allow us to evaluate there software for our reviews. I really like the wealth of information this utility gives us and we thank Lavalys for there support. We ran some tests using Everest and this is what we got.

As already mentioned the Gainward graphics accelerator card is one of a kind, featuring the G71 core fully enabled, having 24 pipelines and 8 vertex shaders. This is actually the same the very powerful GeForce 7900 GTX, meaning that the BLISS 7800 GS+ AGP card is really a Limited Edition graphics design. With the Gainward BLISS 7800 GS+ Golden Sample now easily installed into our test rig, we can go further on our analysis of the performance. But before that we would like to show of the Gainward card being ready to roll with our system. So let's just do that and see how the Gainward BLISS 7800 GS+ Silent fills up the free AGP slot.

This card looks good in our system, what am I saying... It looks awesome! We can already notice that the cooling does not interfere with surrounding motherboard components. Although the BLISS 7800 GS+ Silent is a dual slot design it fits perfectly in our case. So you are right, the Gainward card takes up one addition expansion slot, but than again it comes with a very silent cooling solution even at full load. That's it folks, time to hit up some synthetic tests. We used the ForceWare 91.37 drivers from NVIDIA and will be using Futuremark and AquaMark benchmark utilities and stack up some popular game titles.