Uncovering, Beyond Your Senses...

Enough about the looks, time to dig a bit deeper. Let's see what lies beneath the cooling system of the Gainward BLISS 8800 GTS 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 of your graphics card. So, only 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 whatever reasons. However we don't recommend it, but at the same wanted to share the real stuff that makes the GTS what it is today.

After removing the screws, the heatsink can be taken off and the full scale PCB sees the light. What a difference; the heatsink itself covered almost completely the PCB, with the cooling system being a bit heavier than the PCB itself. Most electronic components have been invisible from the start on the front side of the PCB. Some smaller components were not covered by the heatsink, which are located close to the power connection. All other main components like the GPU, voltage regulators and memory chips however could only be seen once the cooling solution was taken off. Quite normal these days for any high-end graphics accelerator as cooling has become an important aspect.

The Gainward BLISS 8800 GTS is powered by the new G80 series line of graphics processors. The G80 core used is physically the same chip as you will find back on the GeForce 8800 GTX video cards and features the unified shader technology, represented by the stream processors. The NVIDIA G80 chip uses a 90nm manufacturing process for its high performance circuits and has been designed from scratch around the unified shader logic. The GeForce 8800 GTS core works at 500MHz operation speed, actually a bit lower clocked than the GTX which is set at 575MHz. In practice the GTS runs at 513MHz core speeds, so slightly higher than what the specifications detail.

	GeForce 8800 GTX	GeForce 8800 GTS
Core Speed	575MHz	500MHz
Memory Speed	1800MHz	1600MHz
Shader Clock	1350MHz	1200MHz
Stream Processors	128	96
Memory Size	768MB GDDR3	640MB GDDR3
Memory Interface	384-bit	320-bit
HDCP Support	Compliant	Compliant

With the introduction of the G80 core we see that a new era being kicked off which is all about the unified shader technology. To incorporate this within the GeForce 8800 series we see that NVIDIA has come up with the stream processors which can be used in a unified way as either vertex or pixel shader. That means that these are no longer fixed to just being a vertex or pixel shader, but their function changes according to the processing needs. With a unified GPU architecture some bottleneck between pixel, shader and geometric processing is reduced to a great extend. These stream processors have their own speed setting, which is called the shader clock. For the BLISS 8800 GTS the shader clock is set at 1200MHz, but scalable up to 1500MHz according to the specifications.

The Gainward BLISS 8800 GTS comes with ten memory chips in total which are all located on the front side of the board. The memory chips are placed strategically around the G80 core. Each of these memory chips gives their heat away to the coolers aluminum sole via elastic rubber-like thermal pads. By cooling the memory chips on their own, it provides extra protection towards the lifetime of the chips in general. The ram chips are placed four by four by two and give a total of 640MB memory. The GTX version has two extra chips, and you can actually see those missing spots on the GTS board as well.

With 640MB GDDR3 memory the Gainward BLISS 8800 GTS is well equipped for experiencing the full graphical power of current and upcoming gaming technology. It features Samsung branded GDDR3 memory which is running at 1.6GHz speed. These Samsung GDDR3 chips come marked as 1.2ns access time and are therefore rated at 1.6GHz frequency and operating at 1.8V. So what does that mean...no overclocking? Well, not at all as these Samsung memory chips can easily reach over 1.8GHz! And maybe even more. And these chips are known to go really fast as they come from the same batch as the faster 1.1ns memory used on the GTX edition.

The second chip next to the G80 controls input/output functions albeit slightly more advanced. This controller handles Transition Minimized Differential Signaling (TMDS) which is a feature that is very difficult to include in the core itself, particularly given how complex the G80 core already is. The NVIO controller also offers HDCP support which provides a robust, cost effective and transparent method for transmitting and receiving digital entertainment. The two dual link DVI ports on the BLISS 8800 GTS are driven by this new NVIDIA NVIO controller. Well that's about it on the insights of the Gainward BLISS 8800 GTS graphics card, so we will just reassemble it again, applying some new thermal compound and stick it into our test system.