Gainward Bliss 7900 GTX SLI

The Card

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: there is no reason for nVidia’s AIB’s to change the cooling on the 7900GTX card. The reference cooler is excellent. I was very happy, then, when I saw that Gainward had decided to stick with the gorgeous, quiet heatpipe cooler that I have seen on the rest of the 7900GTX’s.

As you can see the cards draw the air in over these fins

And the heatpipes take the heat away

Not forgetting the contact of course

And of course blown out of the back of the case here. We also notice the Dual DVI (as there should be on a top-end card like this) as well as the s-video out that covers pretty much any other connecter you could possibly wish for.

Quick features

nVidia Specification

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® Intellisample^TM 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® UltraShadow^TM II Technology

* Designed to enhance the performance of shadow-intensive games

 

NVIDIA® SLI^TM 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® PureVideo^TM 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® TurboCache^TM Technology2

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

 

Built for Microsoft® Windows Vista^TM

* 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® PureVideo^TM 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

Gainward do a very decent bindle with their higher-end cards and I really do like their “Free to choose” included software title.

In the box:

Quick Start Guide
Driver CD
Expertool overclocking facility
User Manual (PDF on CD)Gainward Muvee auto producer Personal video application
Power DVD 5 Premier
Gainward “Free to Choose” Game voucher x 1 game
Gainward “Muvee” multimedia program
2 x DVI-VGA Adaptors
1 x Dual Molex to PCI-E Power Connector
1 x Video out connector with s-video, composite and component video out

With the price of top-end cards I think an AAA title would be nice in the bundle, but at least Gainward don’t force one old game on their customers with a decent choice of games in “Free to Choose”.

The Cooler

I cannot be more full of praise for the cooler on the Gainward 7900GTX card. This cooler is quiet and keeps the card incredible cool even when heavily overclocked. I have never seen this go over 65°C even under heavy load, overclocked and in SLI configuration so I cannot give anything but praise for the cards cooling. If you want a very powerful card with an incredibly efficient, quiet cooler that performs very well even in SLI mode then look no further.

In place: