My 7900GT Signature Series Review

[Wall7486]

Well, I got the card 3 hours ago and I've ran a few benches. Sorry no pics yet, ill get my camera back over the weekend. So bare with me for now. So far I ran the card in stock and benched it on 3dmark03,05 and CS:S. Then did an auto oc and finally pushed it to 702/1884. So far so good, no artifacting or whatsoever. Idle temp is 53-54C and load is 73-74. Runs much cooler than my 6800GT, which was idling at 60 and shooting up to the mid 80s on full load. Overall getting the card out of the box took longer than the installation. Comes in with 3 box. One giant newegg packaging box, then 2 eVGA boxes.

Now let's not bring in the talk about:
"omfg you wasted all that money when you could've gotten at 7900GT OC, CO, etc"
I clearly see that there was a volt mod tutorial, but I felt that I wasnt comfortable enough with it and I feel that it was a pretty good deal, consdering you get to pick any game thats from 2006, priority for step-up, and overnight RMA. Besides I got a 50 cent raise on my paycheck, so the extra 50$ won't be as bad =D.


My current set up is a 1 and half year old rig:

AMD 4000+ Clawhammer w/Thermalright XP-120
Crucial Ballistix DDR500
A8N-Deluxe
eVGA 7900GT SS 256MB
74GB raptor, 250GB Hitachi Desktar
Dell 2007WFP

Stock 600/1600

Mark05 9809
Mark03 20501
HL2 184.7


Auto OC662/1866

Mark05
Mark03

Mark05 10783
MARK03 22393
HL2 192.26


OC 702/1884

Mark05

Mark05 11100
HL2 193.58


Only got some pics for the benchmark. I'll probably try to push it some more over the weekend and hopefully get back my camera. Just don't have enough time right now, as I only got home a few hours ago.


edit* I just installed Nibitor. The card is fairly new so they can't detect a lot of the settings. Only thing I uncover is that the card is running at 1.45V I believe.

So far I have to say these cards do seem to be cherry picked, but what do I know. But, I am happy that there is no artifacts at such high clocks. More testing in the followings days.

 

[Alaa]

a gr8 card thanx for the small review

 

[LittleNemoNES]

Nice results.

 

[TPL]

Sweet!!

 

[Elfear]

Nice clocks.

 

[1Dark1Sharigan1]

Well, seems like eVGA did do voltage mods on these cards . . .

 

[Hail The Brain Slug]

Originally posted by: 1Dark1Sharigan1
Well, seems like eVGA did do voltage mods on these cards . . .

They did. If you look at side-by-side pictures comparing a Signature Series card and another card, you can see a different # of components (resistors? transistors?) in the area where you do the voltmod for the core.

Those are some very nice scores and overclocks! I was wondering how much eVGA pumped the Signature Series up.

 

[Jules]

oh

 

[fliguy84]

My only gripe with this signature series is the PCB color is still green -_-;;

I would still prefer a blue or black one

But yeah, great card anyway. So which free game did you decide to pick?

Hopefully some other great evga card will come out in the next 3 months so that you can use that "Front-of-the-Line Step-Up? queue" program

 

[imported_ST]

congratulations! great scores and wonderful overclocking!

i might get one to play with and hopefully reverse engineer

btw> do you think you can pm me the bios?

 

[Wall7486]

I did try to use Nibitor. No luck it doesn't seem to be able to detect it. Maybe it is because the card is still new, then again my Nibitor is quite old Ill try to find an update. Ill have more time over the weekends to play around with it somemore. Only thing that came up was the voltage, which was reading at 1.45V.

 

[Jules]

Originally posted by: Wall7486
I did try to use Nibitor. No luck it doesn't seem to be able to detect it. Maybe it is because the card is still new, then again my Nibitor is quite old Ill try to find an update. Ill have more time over the weekends to play around with it somemore. Only thing that came up was the voltage, which was reading at 1.45V.

you should try clocking it higher to see how much you can go since the its reading 1.45v.

 

[Wall7486]

I will definitely. I think there is a good chance that I can max out the RAM, but I'll do it over the weekend. I'm at work right now.

 

[Yreka]

So what game did you choose ?

 

[lektrix]

Is the voltage for the Signature Series 1.4v? Or you got those speeds @ 1.3v?

 

[JAG87]

wow nice card man. considering your getting a single slot card faster then a stock 7900 GTX, thats impressive... great buy! But Im just wondering what kind of temps do you get under load ?

:Q

 

[Wall7486]

It runs on 1.45V lektrix.


JAG-87: I am getting around 73 load. It can probably be lower if I have an intake fan. Neverthless it is running pretty cool for a card clocked this high. The load temp really didnt change, maybe 1-2C, much when I changed the core from 600-702, so is not too bad.

 

[Wall7486]

Back with the tweaking, it seems that I have maxed it out on 720 core and 1910 on memory.

3Dmark05: 11323
3Dmark06: 5349


Basically, almost maxed out on the memory, 1950. I think it is safe to say that the SS can be considered as a 7900GTX in single slot solution. Been a while since I am this happy with a GPU purchase, since the Ati 9700pro.

I am probably a bit CPU bottlenecked. Considering my 4000+ Clawhammer would refuse to take any volts higher than 1.55, so I have no way to make it pass 2.7ghz. I'd love to see people benching this card with a FX-57,FX-60, and some very high overclocked Opteron and probably break 12k on 3dmark 05.