Young lion against old lion

This review is going to focus on the improvements to Inno3D's GeForce 7900 GS so it only stands to reason that we show you a side by side comparison to start it off.  The original (pure reference design) Inno3D 7900 GS has the small copper weaved cooler and tiny 40mm fan to keep the GPU running cool.  The memory was bare as a baby's bottom.  No cooling what so ever. 

The big changes aside from the visible GPU and memory cooling a la Zalman, are the higher clock speeds.  450MHz on the core of the old Inno3D 7900 GS versus a 20% increase to 550MHz on the new iChill Inno3D 7900 GS.  Memory speed also gets a boost from 1350MHz up to 1500MHz.  Adding in some RAM sinks, I think, we'll get higher than that when it comes time for some DIY jack.

The successor

Here's a better face shot of the iChill packing GeForce.  The cooler that dominates the PCB is a Zalman VF900 VGA Cooler.  The VF900 is a copper constructed heatpipe cooler that we'll get a closer look at after we look at the flip side of the card. 

The underside of the card has multiple mounting holes on the PCB.  The unused ones are for the Arctic Cooling NV Silencer 6 cooler.  The small black thumb screws are the tension mounts for our unit's Zalman VF900.

The Zalman VF900 is a pure copper radial design.  Convection fins radiate out 360 degrees from the base and are anchored at the top by a 2mm copper heatpipe.  Now when I say the fins radiate out from the base, it is a little confusing.  The bottom of the fins actually are connected to a second heatpipe that is suspended above the base.  It is the heatpipes themselves that connects the assembly to the base rather than convections fins rising out of the base itself.   

Surprisingly, the entire assembly is elevated only about 30 or so millimeters above the surface of the PCB.  This will leave the SLI folks some breathing room.