Comparing the Inno3D iChill 7900GS card to a reference 7900GS, there are a few differences that help this card pack a better punch. The iChill 7900GS has a default core clock of 550MHz, 100MHz higher than a 7900GS reference board. The iChill 7900GS has a default memory
clock of 1500MHz, 180MHz higher than a 7900GS reference board. This makes the iChill 7900GS much faster than any other 7900GS on the market
that is based on the reference board, and it rivals the 7900GTs, even though it has 4 less pixel pipelines per clock.
Comparison
I'm a huge fan of the cooling devices that Arctic Cooling develops. The one that comes stock on the Inno3D iChill 7900GS is no different. It keeps
the GPU and RAM on the video card nice and cool while they are under the stress of churning out pixels. The cooler is black with a white fan and
has an exhaust port at the rear of the card. The fan itself takes up about a slot and a half, causing the card to take up two and a half slots. My
motherboard only has a single slot between the two PCIe slots, preventing me
from running this card in SLi mode. If your motherboard has two or
more slots between the two PCIe slots, you should be okay to run this card in SLi mode.
Shot of Cooler
The GeForce 7900GS video card supports the cool technologies of the GeForce 7 Series. These are the CineFX 4.0 Engine, Intellisample 4.0,
and the PureVideo Technology. The CineFX 4.0 Engine provides advanced visual effects with double floating-point shader power. Intellisample 4.0
provides advanced gamma correct rotated grid antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. It supports normal map compression which
allows for more lifelike
characters and environments. It provides 2 new antialiasing modes. These are transparency adaptive supersampling and transparency adaptive
multisampling. Both increase the performance and quality of antialiasing. PureVideo Technology enhances HDTV support by delivering 50% more
power and 1080p support. It allows for multi-threaded video processing and accelerated Mpeg2 encoding and decoding. High Definition is quickly
becoming the standard in broadcast video technology. This card efficiently processes High Definition video files, taking the load off of the CPU.
This allows for smoother video while allowing the CPU to perform other tasks. Viewing a couple of 1080 videos from Microsoft, I had plenty of CPU left to
run my graphic editing software and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.
OVERCLOCKING
With a massive (and silent) cooler like the Arctic Cooling Silencer 6, I was pretty sure this card would have a decent stable overclock. I
kicked the core up to 600MHz and the memory up to 1600MHz, and the card was stable. It showed definite improvements in 3DMark06 and all the
games I benchmarked.
Overclocking Settings
Click Image to Enlarge
3DMARK06
3DMark06 Stock
With the overclocking of 50MHz on the core and 100MHz on the memory, we get a 223 point, 4.6% increase in the 3DMark06 score.
