Unlike some of the mock ups of the 6800 Ultra from last year, shipping 7800 GTXs will be single slot video solutions which should be a boon for most users, especially those who have embraced SFFs. Even with the increase in die size and the increase in clockspeed, a combination of the die shrink to 110nm along with some spiffy engineering work internally has brought down both power consumption (roughly 10W less at the maximum draw) and temperatures. One of the things that NVIDIA made a note of mentioning is that they have solved some heat problems so the reduction in cooling apparatus was possible.

Although the cooler has been reduced in height, it has not been reduced in weight. The portion of the heatsink that covers the GPU is now made of copper instead of aluminium like on the GeForce 6 family. While I did not have a scale handy, the 7800 GTX did feel heavier than its predecessors.

Because it is embarrassing to break hardware that is being reviewed, we refrained from taking apart the 7800 GTX heatsink unit. What we were told however is that besides the GPU lurking under the heatsink, there are 8 pieces of 8x32Mb scattered around the board.

The heatsink is cooled by a variable speed fan and while the 7800 GTX is billed as lower noise solution, (10DB quieter than the 6800 Ultra), the same criticisms that I had of the X700 Pro apply here also - the fan is louder than necessary because of the small size. Our office is on the warmer side and the fan on the 7800 had a tendency to spin up and down; on an open work bench this was quite noticeable. While this may be buffered somewhat when sitting inside a case, it is nonetheless worth noting for those who are fanatics when it comes to the noise level of their PC.

Like with the 6800 Ultra, the 7800 GTX sports two DVI slots as well as the multi-function port which in the past has served for VIVO and video out (HDTV component output included) with the addition of a dongle.

There should be few surprises about the rest of the layout which does not seem to differ from the 6800 Ultra all too much. There is still the extra PCIe video power connection required, along the top is the MIO for some SLI action.