7900GT: Unlocking the Beast Within

The 7900GT launched just about a month ago seems to be eyed
by a lot of enthusiasts holding a mid-range budget. For these group of gamers
and 3D lovers, squeezing every bit of performance and image quality out of their
hardware seems to be a growing trend. Let’s face it: Most of us work hard to
pay for our PC/gaming hobby. We put in that extra few hours of work everyday
or skip that juicy steak meal at the fancy restuarants so we can have a wallet
big enough to sustain our hobby.

Naturally, we want to maximize our enjoyment of our new toys,
whether through the pleasing visual effects in our favourtie games, or through
the big numbers we churn out in benchmark scores so we can boast to our friends
about it. That’s when a lot of us start to overclock our hardware, change out
to alternative cooling on them, voltage modify them, etc…. in which the process
ends up becoming a large part of the enjoyment, and not just the end.

The 7900GTs are based on the G71 cores, fabricated on the
90nm process.

As a result of this fine die process, the heat output reduces
and the potential of the clock speed capability of the chip improves compared
to chipsets of the 110nm of the very recent yester months. In short, the G71
core using relatively lower voltage and humbler cooling has the potential to
reach clock speeds the older G70 core struggled to hit even with increased voltage
and exotic and extravagant cooling. If you have been following our past
articles on the G70s, you would have read that very exotic solutions had
to be used to hit the 800MHz ballpark, such as dual stage compressor cooling,
dry ice and liquid nitrogen. How well do these new cards overclock comparatively
then? What is needed to hit this level of speed, since the 7900GT comes clocked
around the same speed as the 7800GTX?