GeForce 7900 GTX reference model uses a huge cooler, as you have seen on the previous pictures. By using a big fan the video card is able to produce less noise, since it can rotate at a lower speed to achieve the same performance of a smaller fan.
We removed the video card cooler to take a look. It has an aluminum body with a copper base, using four heat-pipes to connect its base to its aluminum fins. As you can notice by looking at Figures 4 and 5 the heatsink touches the memory chips, cooling them down.
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Figure 4: GeForce 7900 GTX reference model heatsink.
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Figure 5: GeForce 7900 GTX reference model heatsink.
On Figure 6 you can see the reviewed video card without its cooler.
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Figure 6: GeForce 7900 GTX reference model without its cooler.
This video card uses eight GDDR3 512-Mbit 1.1 ns chips from Samsung (K4J52324QC-BJ11), making its 512 MB video memory (512 Mbits x 8 = 512 MB). These chips can run up to 1.8 GHz. Since this video card accesses its memory at 1.6 GHz, there is 12.5% headroom if you wish to overclock it inside its specs.
On Figure 7 you can see GeForce 7900 GTX chip. As you can see, it is internally called G71-U by nVidia.
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Figure 7: GeForce 7900 GTX chip.
