Gainward Bliss 7300 GT Golden Sample

The Card

Let’s meet the Gainward Bliss 7300 GT Golden Sample “Silent FX”.

The card is indeed quite a small card and does not take up very much room at all in your case. Gainward have done well by adding a silent cooling solution to this card, especially as this does not take up an extra slot like quite a few quiet solutions do.

gainward 7300gt
Very compact and certainly not noisy! The card looks attractive with its red colour and would be suited to a case with a window.
gainward 7300gt

The back of the card is secured by this clever little mechanism that we have seen before on Gainward’s higher-end 7900GT card. It is a good solution and also looks good.

gainward 7300gt
You can see that the heatsink has deep grooves for the air to pass through.
gainward 7300gt
As you can see the card is a pretty small solution. A nice fit for any HTPC.
gainward 7300gt
There are a decent range of connecters on the card, though I always like to see Dual DVI. Still – TV-out, DVI and VGA is a decent range of connecters for any lower-end video card and ideal for HTPC use as I have noted previously.

Quick Features (taken from Gainward’s website)

gainward 7300gt specs

Note that this says that the card has a cooling fan – I don’t think so!

nVidia Specifications:

NVIDIA® GeForce® 7 Series Specifications

NVIDIA® CineFX® 4.0 Shading Architecture

 

* Vertex Shaders
o Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader 3.0
o Displacement mapping
o Geometry instancing
o Infinite length vertex programs
* Pixel Shaders
o Support for DirectX 9.0 Pixel Shader 3.0
o Full pixel branching support
o Support for Multiple Render Targets (MRTs)
o Infinite length pixel programs
* Next-Generation Texture Engine
o Accelerated texture access
o Up to 16 textures per rendering pass
o Support for 16-bit floating point format and 32-bit floating point format
o Support for non-power of two textures
o Support for sRGB texture format for gamma textures
o DirectX and S3TC texture compression
* Full 128-bit studio-quality floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline with native hardware support for 32bpp, 64bpp, and 128bpp rendering modes

64-Bit Texture Filtering and Blending

* Delivers true high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting support
* Full floating point support throughout entire pipeline
* Floating point filtering improves the quality of images in motion
* Floating point texturing drives new levels of clarity and image detail
* Floating point frame buffer blending gives detail to special effects like motion blur and explosions

 

NVIDIA® IntellisampleTM 4.0 Technology

* Advanced 16x anisotropic filtering (with up to 128 taps)
* Blistering-fast antialiasing and compression performance
* Gamma-adjusted rotated-grid antialiasing removes jagged edges for incredible image quality
* Transparent multisampling and transparent supersampling modes boost antialiasing quality to new levels
* Support for normal map compression
* Support for advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data at even higher resolutions and frame rates
* Fast z-clear

 

NVIDIA® UltraShadowTM II Technology

* Designed to enhance the performance of shadow-intensive games

 

NVIDIA® SLITM Technology1

* Patented hardware and software technology allows two GeForce-based graphics cards to run in parallel to scale performance and enhance image quality on today’s top titles.
* Quad SLI technology enabled through select System Builders delivers SLI support for four GPUs, providing mind-blowing performance and image quality at extreme resolutions. SLI support for the GeForce 7950 GX2 will be provided through a future NVIDIA ForceWare driver release. See www.slizone.com for details

 

NVIDIA® PureVideoTM Technology

* Dedicated on-chip video processor
* High-definition H.264, MPEG2 and WMV9 decode acceleration
* Advanced spatial-temporal de-interlacing
* Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
* High-quality video scaling
* Video color correction
* Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window

 

NVIDIA® TurboCacheTM Technology2

* Combines the capacity and bandwidth of dedicated video memory with dynamically allocated system memory to dramatically turbocharge performance

 

Built for Microsoft® Windows VistaTM

* Third-generation GPU architecture built for Windows Vista
* Delivers best possible experience when running Windows Vista 3D graphical user interface
* New OS supported by renowned NVIDIA® Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) for maximum stability and reliability
* NVIDIA® PureVideoTM technology delivers high-quality VMR pipeline for best-in-class video for Windows Vista

 

Advanced Display Functionality

* Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for analog display resolutions up to and including 2048×1536 at 85Hz
* Dual-link DVI capability to drive the industry’s largest and highest resolution digital flat panel displays up to 2560×16001
* Integrated HDTV encoder provides analog TV-output (Component/Composite/S-Video) up to 1080i resolution
* Full NVIDIA® nView® multi-display technology capability

 

High Speed Interfaces

* Designed for PCI Express x16
* Designed for high-speed GDDR3 memory1

 

NVIDIA® Digital Vibrance Control® (DVC) 3.0 Technology

* DVC color controls
* DVC image sharpening controls

Operating Systems

* Windows XP/Windows XP 64
* Built for Microsoft Windows Vista
* Windows 2000
* Linux
* Macintosh OS X

API Support

* Complete DirectX support, including the latest version of Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0
* Full OpenGL support, including OpenGL 2.0

1 Feature available on select GeForce 7 Series GPUs only.
2 Feature available on GeForce 7300 GS and LE GPUs only.

Package

The package included in the 7300GT is pretty sparse with only:

* Gainward Driver Package (including Gainward Expertool Overclocking facility)
* S-video to Component/composite and S-video out
* DVI-VGA converter
* Quick-Start Instuction Manual

gainward 7300gt
I am aware that this is a low-end card but I think perhaps one piece of DVD software could have been included in the bundle – as this is a card that could well be used in a HTPC.

Cooling

There is not much else you can say about this cooler than has already been said. It is well designed, keeps the GPU cool and is totally silent. Gainward have done very well with the cooling and I am most impressed with the cooler.