Introduction

Welcome to the world of Gainward, a world beyond your senses! Gainward is a world leading producer of high-quality, high-end 3D accelerators for the personal computer market. Gainward offers a full product line of value adding products targeting gaming enthusiasts as well as entry-level consumers. Founded in 1984, Gainward has grown exponentially in the channel, serving the system builder, distribution and retail markets with products that offer the highest in quality and customer satisfaction, thereby making the computing experience transparent to the hardware supplied in the box. Their graphics products are known to deliver an incredible realistic gaming experience and highlighting effects as never seen or experienced before. Together with Gainward we invite you to embark on the ride to the future...

Yeps, after all the exciting GeForce 7 series products with several changes and refreshes throughout the past year, we also saw an inventive new product getting introduced by NVIDIA. And no this time it was not a refresh, or redesign but a complete new graphics processor. In November this new chip and the cards based upon it gotten introduced and released by NVIDIA and its partners. And as of that moment all talks have been around DirectX 10, because the new GeForce 8 series are really for the next level in gaming. At the launch day two cards have been introduced, the GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS, and both feature the long awaited G80 graphics core. And Gainward has jumped on the wagon to be amongst the first to release their products based upon the GeForce 8 series designed by NVIDIA.

In fact NVIDIA remained largely silent about their upcoming new technology and quite some rumors did spread around the globe about what the new G80 would and wouldn't be. In the end these rumors started quite a rush and set the scene for the introduction. Finally the G80 did come out better than expected with being the first graphics accelerator to feature the Unified Shader technology. Once again NVIDIA has set the first move and has now the first cards that fully support DirectX 10 for upcoming games like Crysis. The G80 is completely new with a different approach in graphics processing, raising the bar once again. The GeForce 8 series graphics processing units redefine the PC gaming experience and is essential for the best Windows Vista experience.

Main Specifications

GeForce 8800 GTS (G80 at 513MHz) 640MB 320-bit GDDR3 Memory (1584MHz) High-speed 320-bit Memory Interface Memory Bandwidth of 64.0GB/s PCI Express x16 Compatibility High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection H.264 Playback with PureVideo Engine Multi-GPU SLI Bridge Interconnect Support DVI-I Connector for Analog/Digital Display High Performance Cooling Solution

Looking back at the G70 core we could say it was rather a more powerful and enhanced NV45 chip with more vertex and pixel shader units to tune up the gaming performance. With the introduction of the G80 chips this is completely different. The G80 core is a completely new design dedicated to the unified shader environment that the new DirectX 10 has somehow enforced. But what does that mean? Well in essence you can't speak about fixed vertex, pixel or texture units but these are now combined in what NVIDIA calls stream processors. These stream processors can either be used as pixel or vertex shaders, which means variable depending on the needs. This is what represents the unified shader architecture which NVIDIA came up with for their GeForce 8800 series.

The Gainward box comes with some plastic shrink wrap around it. So we had to remove the plastic covering first. This is an extra protection to the package as a whole. The box itself details very clearly the product that you are buying as well as the main features, that it is a PCI Express card with high performance GDDR3 memory. A meanly brown colored box, with some yellow/black to cover the back of the box. This is the standard version, which comes at the default speed settings and supports the SLI technology. Moreover, it outlines clearly that this is the world's first DirectX 10 capable GPU which features a unified architecture and unprecedented levels of graphics performance and realism.

The Gainward version of the GeForce 8800 GTS follows the reference design just like any other. The first version of the GeForce 8800 series all come from the same production and each of the brands puts their own colors and logo on it. These cards are bigger than the previous GeForce 7900 series with the actual PCB almost completely hidden away behind the dual slot cooling solution. Peeking out at the bottom we see the PCI Express interface connection. On top of the cooling solution you can find the Gainward name, which is actually a sticker put on the surface. So almost all current versions of the GeForce 8800 GTS are the same except for the sticker detailing the brand with its typical color scheme.

The rear view is quite sober and resembles to the GeForce 7900 series; with the very typical green colored PCB and screws that hold the cooling. It does show all the details off the PCB, with none of the parts being covered. Some stickers are placed on the back to provide the model details, raw specifications and the serial number. The GeForce 8800 GTS accelerator is HDCP compatible, something that has become very quickly a standard with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are on their way. That means you can rest assured that the Gainward BLISS 8800 GTS should be able to play back HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies when used with the right player software.