The Card

The first thing that got my attention with Inno3D's 7900 GS was its size.  The last high end NVidia card we had here in the shop was a 230mm long 7800 GTX.  To our pleasure, the 7900 GS is a respectable 200mm making the card easy to work with in any rig.  Looking closer we see the memory lies bare to the air with the only cooling on the card being devoted specifically to the GPU.  A small copper heatsink mounting a yellow translucent 40mm fan on one side allows cool air to be blown in and over the convection fins for this GPU cooler. 

Flipping the card over you can tell that the PCB of the 7900 GS is right off the 7900 GTX line.  Notice all the copper screw mounts on the reverse side.  These are for the GTs larger cooling assembly that addresses the RAM as well.  I see this as a plus to the end user making aftermarket cooling assemblies (for the 7900 GT perhaps) much easier to mount.

More shots of the GPU cooler and how it channels air over its copper convection fins and out two of its sides.  Only four of the eight memory modules get air blown directly over them. 

Here we find a close up of the Hynix memory module Inno3D is using.  These Hynix HY5RS573223A units are rated at 1.4ns which relates to 700MHz (1400MHz DDR).  This gives us a little headroom to overclock the card.  Remember that the default memory speed in 660MHz (1320MHz DDR).   

The ends of the card sport dual DVI connectors and an S-Video connector on the business end.  (Yes, there is a DVI to VGA adapter included - I use one too.)  The other has the now expected six pin PCI-E power plug we've come to expect from most modern power hungry graphics cards.