What Lies Beneath? Golden Sample Uncovered...

As we already started to dismantle the Gainward cooling solution, we can just continue and find out what lies beneath the black heatsink powering the BLISS 7950 GT Golden Sample 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. It is just a matter of unclipping the iron back plate and the heatsink comes off easily. However, we don't recommend it.

Once the clips are opened, 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 designed by Gainward. 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 can only be seen once the cooling solution was taken off. For the Gainward version that means that even more was covered than when using the NVIDIA reference cooling solution.

The Gainward BLISS 7950 GT Golden Sample 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	BLISS 7950 GT GS
Core Speed	550MHz	580MHz
Memory Speed	1.40GHz	1.50GHz
Memory Size	512MB GDDR3	512MB GDDR3
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit
HDCP Support	Compliant	Compliant

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. On top of that Gainward opted to with their Golden Sample edition to overclock their card slight to 580MHz core clock.

The Gainward Golden Sample version of the 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. For the Golden Sample, Gainward opted for some faster chip then set out by NVIDIA...

With 512MB GDDR3 memory the Gainward BLISS 7950 GT Golden Sample is well equipped for experiencing the full graphical power of current gaming technology. It features Samsung branded GDDR3 memory which is running at 1.5GHz speed. These Samsung GDDR3 chips come marked as 1.2ns access time and are therefore rated at 1.6GHz frequency and operating at 2.0V. Indeed that means exactly what you might be thinking, some extra room for overclocking. Well actually, Gainward gave a lot of room for overclocking as 1.5GHz is below the normal specifications. And these chips are known to go really fast, like 1.8GHz with a bit of luck...