The Card

With the package out the way it's time to get stuck into the card and see what's going on.

Out of the box you might realize how similar the card looks to the older 7900GT thanks to the same cooler being used - it is essentially a 7900GT though, with a core and memory speed bump and doubling the amount of DDR-3 memory to 512MB which is sure to give you some extra future-proofness.

Keep in mind that the card is also HDCP compliant and if you want to play HD-DVD movies or what-not on your PC in the future, you'll need a graphics card which includes HDCP support.

The back of the card is very typical with your normal circuitry and stickers all over the place, lets flip it back over and have a closer look at some of the details on the card.

While we saw the Gigabyte 7900GS opt for a standard molex connector we can see that ASUS are going down the more traditional route with use the standard 6-pin PCI Express connector which we find on just about all PCI Express cards.

Like all nVidia cards these days, we have our standard SLI connector at the top of the card. We can also see that ASUS are using Infineon memory which is generally not quite as good as our personal favorites - Samsung.

As we mentioned the cooler on the front is the same as the old 7900GT. We can see the copper that runs throughout the card and also the little fan. When it came to overclocking we found it was a lot more effective then the silent heat pipe that XFX opted to use. The only problem we have with the fan is that with it being so small, it needs to spin quite fast and in turn makes it quite noisy when in games (3D clock speed mode). Hopefully you are listening to the game though, which shouldn't make it too much of a problem.

Moving to the I/O side of things we have a pretty standard layout with dual DVI ports that support HDCP and Dual Link along with S-Video port to make use of HDTV out.

All in all the card is pretty standard with nothing out of the ordinary included.