Throwing all the boring stuff aside we got to the actual card – and OH! What a great looking card it is. There simply aren’t enough people that use a black PCB.
Like we mentioned a lot of the traits resemble the more powerful GeForce 7900GT - the 256MB memory layout, the small cooler and of course, the overall length of the card. We can see the bar across the top of the card which is designed to help prevent any flex in the card when shipping and protect the little SLI connector across the top.
Moving to the back of the card we have our normal array of circuitry, c-tick numbers and serial details. Since there is no memory on the bank, there is no need for a heatsink and we can clearly see that the cooler for the front is mounted very securely with four screws placed in each corner.
Flipping the card back over and moving to the back we can see the PCI Express connector that is needed to power the card to its full potential since the PCI-E connector is not able to provide enough juice. If you don’t have a 6-pin connector, you have nothing to worry about as we saw the Molex to PCI Express connector was included in the package on the previous page.
Moving to the top of the card we can see the bracket along with the SLI connector which is present now on everything from the GeForce 7300GT to the mighty 7950GX2.
Moving to the front of the card we can see our very funky venom green DVI ports along with the TV-Out connector at the top. It’s definitely quite a stylish looking graphics card!
Clock Speeds and Overclocking
As we mentioned this particular model is the Extreme variant which of course comes pre-overclocked from the factory. Default on the 7900GS from nVidia is 450MHz on the core and 1320MHz DDR on the memory. XFX have the core running at 480MHz and the memory 1400MHz DDR – nothing too exciting but an overclock none the less!
So we fired up Coolbits thinking we aren’t going to get a huge amount out of it because XFX haven’t seemed to push it all that high. What we got to using “detect optimum frequencies” was simply jaw dropping.
The core was increased from 480MHz all the way to 658MHz (that is 208MHz over stock or a little over 46% higher) and the memory was increased to a very healthy 1648MHz DDR (that is 328MHz DDR or about 25% quicker than default). We continued to run our whole benchmark line up on the card due to these results and our overall opinion was changed in a heart beat.
