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NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX (G70)

By Vijay Anand - 22 Jun 2005

NVIDIA's Reference GeForce 7800 GTX - Part 1

NVIDIA's Reference GeForce 7800 GTX - Part 1

The reference card you see here will be the design that would most likely be utilized on most other vendor's products. As you can see from the photo below, it's rather long and joins the ranks of the GeForce 6800 Ultra 512MB version, GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and the GeForce4 Ti 4600 as one of the longest cards for consumers.

There she is - the reference GeForce 7800 GTX with 256MB of frame buffer.

Our take on the length is perhaps to cater for the 512MB versions of the GeForce 7800 GTX. As we have seen with the initial GeForce 6800 Ultra cards that came with 256MB of frame buffer and compared them to the 512MB variants, it's obvious that the increased count in memory chips required more stable power. To counter that, the power circuitry on the 512MB GeForce 6800 Ultra took up a sizeable portion and lengthened the card. If you were to place that card right next to the GeForce 7800 GTX, they are exactly equal in length (and to a certain extent, the PCB area allocated to the power circuitry as well). How accurate is our speculation? You'll find that out in due time when the frame buffer of the 7800 GTX models possibly double in the near future.

Take a good look because it has dual DVI-I outputs and is a single slot design!

A more important aspect to many would be the thickness profile of the card and we are glad to report that the top dog from NVIDIA is a single slot solution! NVIDIA once said that their GeForce 6800 Ultra would be in a single slot form factor, but that never came true. Its closer cousin, the GT version, made it to a single slot design though. Now on to the next generation and with SLI technology in full force, it seems that they took great pains to ensure the GeForce 7800 GTX would fit into a single slot thermal profile. If you thought they slapped on a strong blower fan, you're would be dead wrong. The GeForce 7800 GTX is a very quiet card and is more silent than its predecessors. Now that's wonderful news to hear, literally.

The rear view of the card has RAMsinks and the securing bracket for the GPU heatsink.

Power transistors were bunched together and slapped with a heatsink to cool them collectively. The blower fan's airflow passes over this heatsink and that facilitates cooling further. Note the 6-pin PCI Express power connector requirement.

While NVIDIA managed to deliver the GeForce 7800 GTX in a single slot profile and maintained very low fan noise, heat was unfortunately rather high. The outcome plotted below is measured during intensive benchmarking and that's in our 22-degrees Celsius air-conditioned lab environment:-

Despite its close-to-scorching operating temperatures, it consumes less power than a GeForce 6800 Ultra. The G70 architecture actually incorporated some facets of NVIDIA's PowerMizer technology that's found on their mobile graphics parts to utilize and conserve power as efficiently as possible. Hence, NVIDIA places the peak power consumption for the GeForce 7800 GTX at about 100 to 110 watts while it's predecessor reaches 120 watts. For power supply concerns, ensure that you have at least a 350W power supply from a renowned manufacturer and throw out those shoddy ones lumped together with most normal casings.

Summing it up, it looks like NVIDIA figured out the form factor, noise and power consumption of the GeForce 7800 GTX, but weren't able to maintain the low operating temperatures of the NV40 series. If only that was possible to tackle as well, then that would have solved most of the common issues of transitioning to a new graphics card product.

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