The Point of View bagged goodies
As you have been able to notice, our review sample today comes from Point of View which was kind enough to supply us with a sample shortly before the actual launch.
The 7800 GS will be available in stores starting from today. POV as always is doing their name justice and releases a box filled with good stuff. The software bundle is good as you receive two full version games.
- Splinter Cell Chaos Theory
- Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow
- Driver CD with a set of tools
- S-Video Cable
- Video Cable + converter
- DVI to VGA Adaptor
Molex Y power connector (yes a 6-pin connector was included, oops ;)
Manual
A diminutive forewarning. Point of View sells these bundles differently in every country based on customer demand. Poland for example is all about a low price so it might be slightly cheaper there yet then there will be no games included and that might differ per country.
There's nothing much to be said here other then it's a very complete bundle and has two very nice games included. We'll show you the card and even more in our photo-shoot.
I'm pretty confident that the 6-pin power connector does not belong in this package ;)
Power Supply - Watt Did You Say?
Power consumption of this card is really not bad. Of course the GeForce 7800 GS requires a stable 12-volt power source for best performance, reliability and most of all that gaming experience of yours. Many PC power supplies dedicate most of their 12-volt power to the power rail that goes to the CPU, rather than the peripheral connectors. Many power supplies also do not provide ample overload protection to protect system components such as motherboards and graphics cards.
For a GeForce 7800 GS graphics card, NVIDIA recommends a 400 watt power supply with 20 amps on the 12 volts rails. So NVIDIA is recommending nothing too dramatic in terms of a power supply unit. Let's test that...
We simply look at the peak Wattage during a 3DMark05 session to verify those claims. The graphics card consumes roughly 75 Watts at peak during 3D gaming, this is also the reason why we see a Molex power connector on the card.
Of course we do what we always do with new graphics' cards, we monitored the overall wattage peak with the help of a wattage meter. Slight side note, you are looking at the overall usage of the PC. The meter is placed between the power connector and the PSU.
In 3DMark the PC shows a maximum peak use of 270 Watt. Yet this AGP system uses less power compared to our standard high-end rig.
So indeed, you need 350 at the least as you want some spare wattage and 400 Watts is definitely recommended. When you buy a new PSU then look at the packageing and check the 12 volts rail on Ampare, it should be 20 AMPS minimal.
** Using a Wattage meter is not the most reliable way of measuring power consumption. You basically look at how much power is the power circuit from your house pulling from the PSU. Please look at the results as being an indication and not an exact science.
Is the card hot?
As always the standard reference cooling design works really efficiently.
At idle, normal operation, expect roughly 39 Degrees C. At 100% graphics core utilization we measured a maximum 67 Degrees C peak temperature, which is actually becoming the norm. Two years ago I would have freaked out though. Speaking of cooling and thus ventilation, the cooling fan at 100% utilization does not make a lot of noise at all, in fact the HD is producing way more noise then the reference cooler on this NVIDIA graphics card and that's very nice to observe.
The bigger two slot exhaust coolers we see on a lot of cards these days actually do have my preference as single slot coolers tend to dump that heat inside your PC, where as the dual slot coolers are designed to dump that heat outside the PC. As always, make sure your PC is well ventilated.
Really lovely IDLE temperatures.
Noise Levels - dB what ??
Nauseating. Yes I'm talking about the noise that PC's these days produce. The only way that will change that is if we all will pay attention to it.
When graphics cards produce a lot of heat usually that heat needs to be transported away from the hot core as fast as possible. Often you'll see massive active fan solutions that can indeed get rid of the heat, yet all the fans these days make the PC a noisy son of a gun. I'm doing a little try out today with noise monitoring, so basically the test we do is extremely subjective. We bough a certified dBA meter and will start measuring how many dBA originate from the PC. Why is this subjective you ask? Well, there is always noise in the background, from the streets, from the HD, PSU fan etc etc, so this is by a mile or two not a precise measurement. You could only achieve objective measurement in a sound test chamber.
The human hearing system has different sensitivities at different frequencies. This means that the perception of noise is not at all equal at every frequency. Noise with significant measured levels (in dB) at high or low frequencies will not be as annoying as it would be when its energy is concentrated in the middle frequencies. In other words, the measured noise levels in dB will not reflect the actual human perception of the loudness of the noise. That's why we measure the dBa level. A specific circuit is added to the sound level meter to correct its reading in regard to this concept. This reading is the noise level in dBA. The letter A is added to indicate the correction that was made in the measurement.
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TYPICAL SOUND LEVELS |
|
Jet takeoff (200 feet) |
120 dBA |
|
|
Construction Site |
110 dBA |
Intolerable |
|
Shout (5 feet) |
100 dBA |
|
|
Heavy truck (50 feet) |
90 dBA |
Very noisy |
|
Urban street |
80 dBA |
|
|
Automobile interior |
70 dBA |
Noisy |
|
Normal conversation (3 feet) |
60 dBA |
|
|
Office, classroom |
50 dBA |
Moderate |
|
Living room |
40 dBA |
|
|
Bedroom at night |
30 dBA |
Quiet |
|
Broadcast studio |
20 dBA |
|
|
Rustling leaves |
10 dBA |
Barely audible |
We startup a benchmark, we take the dBA meter, move away 75 CM and then aim the device at the active fan on the graphics card. We measure roughly 46-47 dBa which is to be considered a moderate noise level coming from the PC. Again, this is a very subjective test.
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