A serious word of advice !
Before you consider buying this product there are two major concerns you need to be aware of. The first is Quad SLI, it's simply not possible to hook up another Galaxy GeForce 7900GT Dual Core unit in your SLI system as there's no extra SLI interconnect for it which is a bit of a pity.
Secondly .. and this is a bit of a bummer. Currently the Galaxy GeForce 7900GT Dual Core masterpiece products (the other products as well) will only work properly on NFORCE 4 SLI series mainboards. I have tested it on a NFORCE 590 SLI mainboard for example and SLI will simply not activate, so you are stuck at one working graphics core. So please keep in mind that you need to have an NVIDIA NFORCE 4 SLI chipset based mainboard in order to get this unit to run in SLI. It's a big downside, yet Galaxy foresees full compatibility with other SLI mainboards in the future.
With that out of the way, let's have a look at the bundle.
The bundle
Now we always mention what candy you get included in the box. Obviously with a masterpiece product you get a little extra, and it shows.
First off the packaging is just beautiful. Obviously next to a pound or two weighing card itself you'll find a small set of driver CD and manual, one DVI-to-VGA dongle, video out-to-component (3-way RCA) adaptor for component TV connection and an S-Video cable. Next to that we see two 6-pin PSU adapter cables and what I personally like very much, a DVI-D to HDMI cable so that you can hook up the product directly to your HD television. That's really good value, as I recently bought two of such cables at 40 bucks a piece.
Although a little low on software, the hardware is very adequate to get you connected and for the money versus this card's features it's absolutely nothing to be ashamed about. Again I really like the inclusion of that DVI-HDMI cable, a very good call to make.
Guru Power !
Power consumption then. Any videocard obviously requires a stable 12-volt power source for best performance, reliability and most of all that gaming experience of yours. We tested a lot of PSU's lately, be sure to read through a couple of reviews.
What we always do with new graphics' cards, we measure the wattage peak with the help of a wattage meter. Slight side note: You are looking at the overall usage of the entire PC.
The meter is placed between the power connector and the PSU. So please understand that 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. So you need to look at the results as being an indication and not an exact science. Let's have a look at consumption:
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| Card |
PC Power Consumption in Watt |
| GeForce 7900 GS |
184 |
| GeForce 7900 GT |
189 |
| GeForce 7950 GT |
190 |
| GeForce 7900 GS SLI |
245 |
| GeForce 7900 GT SLI |
275 |
| Galaxy 7900 GT MP |
295 | |
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We simply look at the peak Wattage during a 3DMark05 session to verify power consumption. You are not looking at the power consumption of the graphics card, but of the entire PC.
So then, you need 420 Watt at the least as you want some spare wattage and 520 Watts or better is definitely recommended. When you buy a new PSU then look at the packaging and check the amperes on the 12 volts rail, it should be 30 AMPS minimum (for the total of +12 volts rails).
For two overclocked 7900 GT's the 420 Watts PSU should still be sufficient. But I'd really like to recommend a 520 Watt SLI-Ready PSU, preferably with dual 12 volts rails.
There are some good SLI certified PSU's out there, again have a look at our many PSU reviews.
And if you are wondering what can happen if your PSU can't cope with the load...
- bad 3D performance
- crashing games
- spontaneous resetting PC
- freezes during gameplay
- PSU overload can cause it to break down
So many things can happen.
Dangerous Liaisons - temperatures of the graphics card
For two cores you a good fan as the card will get hot for sure. The cooler is working really well. Let's have a look at the temperatures these coolers produce. We measured at a room temperature of 22 Degrees C.
This is a very generic cooling level to be at. So the design works really well. Unfortunately it makes a lot of noise. We'll get into that in a second. Each graphics core will idle at give or take 50 Degrees C and will peak at 65 maybe 70 degrees C. The fans are powerful and move a lot of airflow around.
Noise Levels coming from the graphics card
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 |
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Jet takeoff (200 feet) |
120 dBA |
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Construction Site |
110 dBA |
Intolerable |
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Shout (5 feet) |
100 dBA |
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Heavy truck (50 feet) |
90 dBA |
Very noisy |
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Urban street |
80 dBA |
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Automobile interior |
70 dBA |
Noisy |
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Normal conversation (3 feet) |
60 dBA |
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Office, classroom |
50 dBA |
Moderate |
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Living room |
40 dBA |
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Bedroom at night |
30 dBA |
Quiet |
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Broadcast studio |
20 dBA |
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Rustling leaves |
10 dBA |
Barely audible | |
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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.
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| Card |
Sound Level in measured inDBa |
| Galaxy 7900 GT MP |
54 | |
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As stated, this is a massive fan aka cooling system. It does it's job really really well, unfortunately the side-effect is that when heat starts to build up the fan is really out there noise wise and DBa levels rise over 50 DBa, that's a lot. So during your gaming experience you will hear your graphics card for sure. It's not an irritating high pitch or anything, you just hear the fan clearly.
It's the nature of the beast, the clocks are so high and you have two cores together. That's disposing a lot of heat which needs to be moved out of there.
It would have been REALLY cool if Galaxy would have opted for some sort of watercooling for this product series.
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