Continued:

The first time you take a look at this card, you will be amazed at the size of the heatsink. NVIDIA is using a larger fan, which means that it will cut down on rotations per minute, but circulate a substantial amount of air to dissipate heat well. Not only will the larger fan cut on heat efficiently, but it’ll also generate less noise, thereby making the entire cooling system a productive solution.

NVIDIA has moved to a higher density onboard memory, which is rated at 900MHz, meaning vendors (such as ASUS, XFX and EVGA) can overclock their cards above stock speeds, thereby introducing special edition cards in the market to gain a competitive edge in the market (it might be good for the manufacturer, but it’s certainly not good for the consumers who will have to compare prices and pick the best option between a variety of models, special editions and whatnot before plumping money for their new card). The larger heatsink will once again ensure that even at overclocked speeds, the card remains stable and cool. Although we’ve read reports claiming an impressive 1GHz overclock for an ATI GPU, we are unsure whether the card is operational under heavy load. Nonetheless, it’ll be interesting to see how much NVIDIA’s top end card can overclock and how much of an impact the final speed has on its performance.

The power supplies recommended are still the same, and once we thoroughly test the card in our lab, we’ll let you know if the utilization is on par with NVIDIA’s recommendations or if the card draws more power. We suspect the case to be the latter, since higher clocked core, memory and a large fan will definitely need more power (although the difference shouldn’t be significant). How much more is perhaps a more relevant question and we hope to answer that soon.

Despite all the brilliance and the dazzling performance that this card undoubtedly holds, we are unsure how long NVIDIA will manufacture this part. Come 2006, ATI will surely be ready with its R580 chips, which will, in all probability, be the ones to beat NVIDIA in the battle of the titans. Needless to say, NVIDIA would have to revise its product line to stay competitive with ATI. Now that NVIDIA has the ball in its court, it might as well enjoy the lead it has against ATI with GeForce 7 Series.