Introduction

Point of View was established in 2000 and is based in Europe, or Holland to be exact. Their graphics card line up is NVIDIA exclusive, but they offer computer cases, power supplies, mice and custom cooling as well.

Today we take a look at the Point of View 7900GTX, which is based on the current high end chip from NVIDIA, the G71. The 7900 Series was introduced during CeBIT this year, and has replaced the old 7800 Series line up. Let's take a look at the technical specs of the two generations:


The first thing that becomes apparent is the difference in clock speed. Keep in mind that even the very rare 7800GTX 512 was running at 550 MHz, still 100 MHz short of the 7900GTX. On the other hand, while memory clocks have been raised to 1.6 GHz (800 MHz DDR) compared to the normal 7800GTX, the 7800GTX 512 has memory running at 1.7 GHz (650MHz DDR). Even though 1.1ns memory is used on the 7900GTXs which are based on the reference design, the voltage supplied to these chips has been reported to be only 1.8V instead of the usual 2.0V. So even though the memory chips are capable of 1.8 GHz at full voltage, you will not find any cards offering that speed.

Another important improvement is the move to the 0.09 micrometer manufacturing process. This means NVIDIA can produce more cores on a wafer, thus reducing the overall price of the GPU. A GPU that was previously 333mm² is now 196mm², but not all that is due to the new process. NVIDIA also made a lot of the changes to the die itself, as can be seen by the lowered transistor count of 278 million, down around 24 million from the 7800GTX. By going with 0.09 micrometer, NVIDIA has managed to bump the speed up considerably to 650 MHz, while keeping the same thermal envelope as the 7800GTX 512 at 550 MHz.