As this card is based on a graphical processor that in its natural state has 20 calculation units, four of which have been disabled in the 7900 GS, the first thought that naturally came to our minds was to try to enable the disabled units. Using Rivaturner, the famous video card tweaking software that was able to enable all 16 pipelines on the GeForce 6800, we tried to enable the four disabled pipelines. Unfortunately, this modification did not work for us in our testing.

After trying to enable the pipelines, and failing, we decided to move on to the classic practice of gradually overclocking the video card. We began by steadily increasing the operating frequency of the core and memory until we hit the video cards’ limit. We were able to reach the satisfactory overclock of 560 MHz for the Core and 1730 MHz for the memory. Using the overclocked GeForce 7900 GS, we ran some more tests using Far Cry.

The overclock had a very positive impact on performance. We had gains in performance of up to 20%.

We conducted the following power consumption tests using a Lafayette PA-33 ammeter clamped on to the alternating current used from the local power source of the test system.

The diagram is evidence to the optimal power use qualities of the GeForce Series 7. The 7900 GS consumed less power than all ATI competitors and was second only to the 7600 GT.

We measured the noise emitted from the video card by performing the testing in an environment free of all household noises. We placed a noise meter a distance of approximately 10 cm from the cooling system of the video card. We suggest not interpreting these values as absolute measures of what you would hear from the card on a daily basis, but simply as a comparison of the amount of noise emitted from video cards competing with the GeForce 7900 GS, and to find out which card is the loudest of the pack.

As the system of cooling is the same one used on the GeForce 7900 GT, we got exactly the same results between the 7900 GS and the 7900 GT. At idle, as can be seen, the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 was loudest at 57 decibels. However, under stress, all three NVIDIA video cards were louder than their ATI competitors.