14 DAY TRIAL // Announced last week, BLISS 7900GS PCX from Gainward seemed to be just another 7900GS "incarnation", but latest reviews reveal outstanding facts about this. The PCX line-up from Gainward always packs some premium features that come at a decent price. BLISS 7900GS PCX comes equipped with 512 MB GDDR3 memories, unlike other 7900GS releases, and has replaced the cooler with a really fancy and efficient one.
BLISS 7900GS PCX is powered by a G71 chip with 20 rendering pipelines enabled and it is clocked at 550 Mhz (core) and 1320 Mhz (memories). It also features 1.4 ns Samsung memories that can be overclocked to an incredible 1600 Mhz, bringing the core to 654 Mhz, as reviewers from The Inquirer report in their latest article. Now that's some overclocking capacity.
The default settings of 7900GS render it just a little bit behind the 7900GT, but when overclocking the PCX model, 7900GT gets intimidated. According to The Inquirer review, on a Athlon FX 62 2800 AM2 processor, the overclocked 7900GS scores 127.4 f/s in Doom3 at default quality 1280 X 1024, while 7900GT scores 116.5 f/s. In Quake 4, with High Quality options enabled, overclocked 7900 GS scores 82.2 and 7900GT manages only 65.2 at 2048 X 1536. These are just a few examples, but most of the times, the overclocked 7900GS edition gets a 23% performance advantage.
All this goodness is priced at around ? 220, but the 7900GS PCX has yet to be tested against X1950 Pro in order to identify the new mid-high-end king.