Overclocker Cafe - Inno3D GeForce 7900 GS iChill Review

Shifting our gaze to the memory, we find some small aluminum RAM sinks fitted to the memory modules. The design of the Zalman VF900 allows air to be blown down and over these sinks making them, for all practical purposes an active but technically passive cooling solution.

Pulling up one of the RAM sinks to confirm the memory module's identity, I was taken completely by surprise. I falsely assumed that Inno3D took their existing GeForce 7900 GS and dropped on new cooling apparatus. Uh... no. The memory on the Inno3D GeForce 7900 GS we reviewed in October last year was sporting Hynix DDR3 memory rated at 1400MHz DDR. The DDR3 memory on the iChill Inno3D card is Samsung memory rated at 1600MHz DDR. This opens up a few more teeth in our gleaming anticipatory smile of abusing this card on the bench.

Rounding out the photo shoot are some fore and aft shots. The GeForce 7900 GS requires a 6-pin PCI-E power connector to help keep it the 7900 GS core pushing pixels. The connection end sports gold plated dual DVI ports as well as TV-out for a cleaner signal.

Performance

Today, we are going to look at the improvements that Inno3D has made with their iChill card over its predecessor based on the same product. Therefore, our comparison card today will be the Inno3D GeForce 7900 GS. Testing will be done by real world gameplay with frame rates recorded by the FRAPS program. Results are graphed in three minute segments from within Battlefield 2, Need For Speed: Most Wanted and Quake 4. Inside each of these games, we have saved spots where we can record gameplay from a set location making the course of action easier to duplicate between test products. Screen resolution will be 1600 x 1200 pixels in each run with all other settings set to max with the exception of FSAA. Full screen anti aliasing will be set to 0x in our testing.

Test Bed

Foxconn C51XEM2AA SLI mainboard
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Socket AM2 @ 2.22GHz (222MHz x 10)
Tt Mini Typhoon Cooler
(4) 1GB OCZ PC2-6400 Ti Memory (4-4-4-15)
(2) 250MB Western Digital Caviar SE SATA II HDD in RAID 0 Array
Generic DVD-RW drive
OCZ GameXStream 700w
Modified Lian Li PC-V65 Case
Windows XP Pro with all service packs installed

Results

Using Battlefield 2's Zetar Wetlands map, we recorded a three minute segment of a play with all settings set to ‘high’ at 0x FSAA with a screen resolution of 1600 x 1200.

Minimum 7900 GS - 51 / Minimum 7900 GS iChill - 50
Maximum 7900 GS - 94 / Maximum 7900 GS iChill - 98
Average 7900 GS - 79 / Average 7900 GS iChill - 81

Some small increases here but nothing really significant. Let's check Quake 4 and see if the extra megahertz are destined to help us.

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Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - Old Lion vs. New Lion
Pg 3 - The new lion / Performance
Pg 4 - Performance / Overclocking
Pg 5 - Temperature / Conclusion