Gainward was founded in 1984 (not the book! ~ed). During these 21 years, Gainward has risen to become one of the top producers of graphics boards in Taiwan. Products from Gainward include Video cards, mainboards, video capture cards, and TV tuners. With branch offices in the U.S, Germany, UK, Sweden, Hong Kong and the Corporate Office in Taipei, they are well placed to deliver a quality service worldwide.

The cards reviewed here are two Gainward 7800 GTX Golden Sample boards. The Golden Sample moniker is only used for Gainward’s top of the range boards which are factory clocked with higher core and memory speeds.

The Golden Sample increases the clock speeds to 470MHz/1300MHz, that’s 40MHz increase on the core and 100MHz increase on the memory. Memory bandwidth is increased by 3.2GB/sec over the reference card. The clock speed increases here will no doubt be insignificant when using anything less than 1600x1200. This is because recent cards are CPU limited, meaning the CPU is holding back speed increases and so higher GPU clock speeds will do little to increase the frame rate. Choose 1600x1200 or higher with anti-aliasing turned on however, and the GPU will start to become the limiting factor, so the increased clock speeds should improve performance.

The Gainward 7800 GTX Golden Sample follows the Nvidia reference design closely. The only difference is the red graphic covering the heatsink, which makes the cards look very nice against the green PCB. In the box came a 6-pin PCI-Express power adapter for those of you who don't have any on their power supply, two DVI-to-VGA connectors and a VIVO connector allowing access to RGB in, S-Video In/Out and Component In/Out connections.

Gainward kindly supplied two 7800GTX Golden Sample cards to allow us to test the performance in an SLI configuration. That’s £800 worth of pixel pushing power staring back at ya!

The following pictures are of the front and back of the cards. There’s nothing more to say here really, except to reiterate that these cards follow the Nvidia reference design down to the letter.

As already mentioned, we will be testing the cards in single and SLI configurations, so the following pictures are dedicated to this very expensive, albeit top performing option. You may have noticed the SLI adaptor used has Lanparty written on it, which should give away the fact that I’ll be using a DFI Lanparty UT nF4 SLI-D for testing.

Here are both cards installed in the test rig. There is no getting away from the fact that they make the insides of your PC look ten times cooler than with only the one card.