GIGABYTE decided to follow the same design as NVIDIA’s reference design. One thing to note about the 7900GT is its similarity in design to the 7600GT. The fan is a 29-fin radial fan that mirrors NVIDIA’s reference fan on their 7900GT. One of NVIDIA’s advantages with their 7xxx series is the lower power usage and higher clock speeds when compared to the competition. The heat sink on the 7900GT is the same as that found on the 7600GT as well.

When comparing the 7600GT and the 7900GT PCB it’s clear that the main difference is the memory configuration. The 7600GT has a 128-bit memory bus, and the memory chips are 4 64MB chips. The 7900GT has 8 32MB memory chips with 256-bit traces. Gigabyte’s 7900GT has a memory clock speed of 660MHz, the same as NVIDIA’s reference card.

The 7900GT is a PCI Express native video card. Early NVIDIA PCI Express cards like the 5750 and 5300 required a bridge chip NVIDIA calls HSI (High Speed Interconnect) to operate on a PCI Express motherboard. Later cards starting with the 6600GT series had the cards be native, not requiring the bridge chip. NVIDIA also uses the bridge chip to put a PCI Express native card on the AGP bus.

GIGABYTE decided to outfit the card with two DVI-I ports and an S-Video Out port. This allows the consumer to have two DVI-I LCD monitors, one LCD+ analogue CRT, two CRTs, or to connect a HDTV to play games on. The 7900GT has dual Dual-Link TMDS transmitters allowing the card to drive big monitors like the Apple Cinema or Dell 3007 screens.