Uncovered, the Technology Behind...

Time to dig a bit further, and see what lies beneath the cooling system of the NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT 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.

After removing the screws, the heatsink can be taken of and the full scale PCB sees the light. What a difference, the heatsink itself covered only a quarter of the PCB and both the cooling system and PCB have an equal weight. Most electronic components have been visible from the start on the front side of the PCB. But only the most significant component was covered by the copper heatsink. All other components like the voltage regulators, capacitors, resistors and memory chips were not hidden by the cooling system. This is quite a difference from what we have seen with other graphics accelerators where almost the full PCB is covered by the cooling solution.

The NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT is powered by the well known G71 series line of graphics processors. The G71 core used is physically the same chip as you will find back on the GeForce 7900 GTX video cards and features 24 pipelines. The NVIDIA G71 chip uses a 90nm manufacturing process for its high performance circuits and is actually an optimized die shrink from the previous G70 chip. The GeForce 7950 GT core works at 550MHz operation speed, actually a bit lower clocked then the GTX which is set at 650MHz.

	GeForce 7950 GT	GeForce 7900 GT
Core Speed	550MHz	450MHz
Memory Speed	1.40GHz	1.32GHz
Memory Size	512MB GDDR3	256MB GDDR3
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit
Pixel Shaders	24	24
Vertex Shaders	8	8
HDCP Support	Compliant	N/A

The NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT can be considered as a redesigned and optimized version of the GeForce 7900 GT with some extra features such as HDCP support. All NVIDIA partners can't wiggle out of that either, all GeForce 7950 GT's based graphics accelerators should support the copy protection standard. Next, NVIDIA also decided that the GT version needed an extra 256MB frame buffer which lead to a total of 512MB graphics memory. This certainly will come in handy when processing large texturing and higher resolutions during game play.

The NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT 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 environment without any heat spreaders. This might sound a bit strange as the high performance memory chips do produce some heat when running at full speed. The ram chips are placed two by two and give a total of 512MB memory.

With 512MB GDDR3 memory the NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT is well equipped for experiencing the full graphical power of current gaming technology. It features Infineon branded GDDR3 memory which is running at 1.4GHz speed. These Infineon GDDR3 chips come marked as 1.4ns access time and are therefore rated at 1.4GHz frequency and operating at 2.0V. So what does that mean...no overclocking? Well, not at all as these Infineon memory chips can easily reach over 1.5GHz! And maybe even more.