Test Rig Configuration

That's it about the card itself, from a hardware and design point of view. Leaving you with all with this impression on the Gainward BLISS 7950 GT Golden Sample we are going to move to the performance you can expect from this graphics accelerator. The system used to compile and analyze the gaming performance figures is build around the high-end Intel Core 2 Duo technology, which will provide extensive central processing power supporting the G71 visual and processing capabilities. So, let's go through the system specifications...

System Specifications

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (Conroe) 1.86GHz Dual Core Processor
• ASUS P5W Digital Home Deluxe (i975X) Mainboard
• Crucial 10th Anniversary 2GB PC2-5300 Dual Channel Memory
• NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT 512MB Graphics Card
• Gainward BLISS 7950 GT 512MB Golden Sample Card
• Western Digital 320GB Caviar SE 8MB Cache (7.200rpm) Hard Disk
• Zalman ZM460-APS 460W Noiseless (SLI Ready) Power Supply
• Spire Pininfarina SP-ATX-PALU Silver Tower Case
• Sony SDM-HX93/B 19" (Black) LCD Monitor
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional incl. SP2 Edition

The ASUS mainboard is based around the Intel 975X chipset supporting the Intel Core 2 Duo processor and DDR2 memory. And ASUS is known to be a leader when it comes to overclocking and supporting more extra features out of the box. We will be using our modest Core 2 Duo E6300 but running at 2.8GHz to support the high-end graphics cards. So both the mainboard and CPU are fine tuned to support this overclocking, to provide the maximum compatible and stable clock speeds. Currently the Core 2 Duo processors are the top of the market, with AMD trailing behind. Yeah, you may say and what about the Core 2 Quad from Intel? Well when looking at the game titles, none of these support the quad core technology yet.

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 their support. Everest Ultimate Edition 2006 is the cutting-edge benchmarking and diagnostics tool to maximize security, performance, and troubleshooting capabilities for home and home office PC environments, PC professionals and consulting firms as well as OEM partners and configuration centers worldwide. We ran some analyzing tests using Everest and this is what we got.

Coming back on what is different with the Gainward Golden Sample edition of the GeForce 7950 GT accelerator; we can see that it is a pre-overclocked version reported by the Everest report. The Golden Sample comes clocked at 580/1500MHz which is slightly higher clocked than the reference 550/1400MHz set by NVIDIA. The BLISS 7950 GT Golden Sample is powered by the G71 core featuring 24 pixel pipelines and 8 vertex shaders. With the Gainward Golden Sample now easily installed into our test system, we can go further with our analysis of the performance. But before that we would like to show of the Gainward card being good to go with our system. Let's do that and see how the Gainward BLISS 7950 GT Golden Sample fills up the free PCI Express expansion slot.

Yeps installed and ready to kick some... But before we go on, 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 Gainward BLISS 7950 GT Golden Sample 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 decent cooling solution even at full load. That's it folks, time to hit up some synthetic tests. We used the ForceWare 92.91 drivers from NVIDIA and will be using Futuremark and AquaMark benchmark utilities and stack up some popular game titles. Let's roll...