Cooling, Beyond Your Senses...

Now, Gainward didn't just take NVIDIA's reference design and put its sticker on it. Instead they went their own way and changed the cooler and made the card look really fancy. Actually when you look back at the reference cooling solution, it is quite small though sufficient to get the job done. Most of the partners are using the reference cooler and just putting their own sticker in it to identity their brand and product. Gainward didn't follow that approach, and designed its own solution. The black cooler covers the whole card and cools it very quietly and efficiently. But let's just see what it looks like in a bit more detail...

So how do we get started, well the easy way by just looking at the card and the first that comes to mind is the black cover with holes. Not only something that is looking great but also protects the front of the cards itself. Maybe not immediately what Gainward had in mind when they came up with this cooling design, but it certainly does that on top. The black cover plate covers the complete front of the card, with a big hole in the middle. This is where the fan resides for the intake of air to cool the heatsink. The holes on the cover are made on purpose, and will allow an improved airflow. With a closed cover the air would just get stuck between the card and the cover plate, and would end up in a build of hot air in the end.

Removing the black cover plate it an easy task. By just removing the screws, the plate comes off and we get a good view on the heatsink that Gainward is using. Following the black cover, the heatsink itself is also black with a fan in the middle. The design of the fan and heatsink is somehow familiar... Do you remember the older CPU coolers? The ones from before you had those aluminum and copper based solutions? Well at that time you could by some decent black heatsink with fan on top, with a variant that had a higher heatsink and the fan put into the heatsink itself. Just to give you a bit where we got this small deja vu... Though this heatsink is somehow bigger.

Looking at the heatsink alone you can see it is well quite high and with large bowed fins to guide the air. Due to this the Gainward cooling solution is a dual slot design, with higher performance and cooling ability then the reference cooler by NVIDIA. The fan is encased by the heatsink, and draws the air from the top through the fan blades towards the heatsink. An inventive way for keeping the GPU cool as the air not going in one direction through the fins of the heatsink, but is spread circle wise over the full heatsink. Via this way Gainward achieves an optimized airflow and outstanding cooling for both the GPU and even the memory chips. The memory chips which are placed around the GPU and benefits from the 360° wide airflow generated through the fan and bowed fins.

Turning over the BLISS 7950 GT Golden Sample accelerator we can spot the grey iron back plate that holds the heatsink in place. Once again Gainward went to think out of the box and came up with a mechanism to keep the heatsink firmly fitted. This is done by a clip mechanism that clips and holds the heatsink in four spots. And that does the job just great. While all others brands just use screws to hold it all together, it certainly proves that Gainward is showing to be superior with their products. And innovative design that looks good and does stand out in the crowd, beating the standard cooling which feature the reference NVIDIA design.

Gainward added as well an exhaust grill that comes with the rear I/O plate. You can find a dual DVI and S-Video output on the rear I/O plate. The exhaust grill is positioned just above these interfaces and will guide the hot air out of the system. As mentioned Gainward opted for a different approach then the reference design, which in the end will be in their favor. As with all GeForce 7900 series, you will find a PCI Express power connection to provide the Golden Sample with the require power. As with all high-end graphics card the PCI Express interface alone is not sufficient to fully power the G71 chip to unleash its stunning visual processing capabilities.