Gainward offers another flavour of 7900 GS this month with a 512MB version. However, the most notable thing about it is the form factor. Unlike other 7900 GS and GTs, it takes up two backplanes thanks to the large, spiky heatsink fan. What this lacks in aesthetics, compared to XFX’s. offering, it makes up for in being almost totally silent.

As with other 7900 GS cards this has seven vertex shaders and 20 pixel shaders. It runs at the reference settings of 450MHz core clock and 660MHz memory. The 512MB of memory should only make a difference when playing games which require this much for textures, there shouldn’t be much difference otherwise.

In our medium tests (at 1280 x 1024) the Gainward scored 49fps in Far Cry and 39fps in Call of Duty 2 (CoD2). Thus it was 5fps slower than a 7900 GT in Far Cry and 2fps quicker in CoD2. We reran the CoD2 test with Extra textures turned on to see how much difference the 512MB made over XFX’s. 256MB. Both scored 38fps suggesting that extra memory is as good as a slight overclock.
Baring in mind that the Gainward can be overclocked easily (and more stably thanks to the larger heatsink), it’s our pick of the two. However, once again we expect the fastest choice to be a self-overclocked 7900 GT. All cost the same at the end of the day.

Another choice would be an Ati X1900 GT which now costs similar. This isn’t quite as powerful (but was never more than 3fps away from a 7900 GT in our tests) but does offer Ati’s exclusive features like using HDR and antialiasing at the same time and video transcoding. As such we can’t recommend the Gainward.