THE GREEN Goblin and his minions were very worried about their answer to upcoming R520 monster from the jolly Canadians. You see, G71 is the secret code name for a green answer to red danger. The PCB on which G71 chip resides is almost identical to the one used in GeForce 7800GTX, with the only thing really changing the cooling and number of memory modules, of course. After the company from Satan Clara learned that R520 is going to use dual slot copper cooling in X850XT Press Edition-style, it gave the green light to the engineers that are trying to make the board to break every speed record set by Nvidia's G70 and ATU's R520 - OC gurus such as Macci and Oppainter excluded, of course. The "Faster G70", which is how the G71 is being called internally now, targets almost insane clock speeds. We have learned that several boards achieved a clock speed of 800MHz, which just goes to prove that tweaks being done in 110nm G71 core will make R520 tremble, and force ATI to respond with its 32-pipe R580 as soon as possible. However, we have to warn you that we haven't been able to find out in what environment this clockspeed was achieved. But it was achieved using new and improved two-slot cooling, not water or phase-change cooling. On prototype boards, cooling solution is separated in two halves, with nicely sized 72 or 80mm fan in the middle. Both halves feature large number of aluminium fins, through which two heat pipes lead the heat from the center block (hidden under the fan) which covers the GPU completely. Also, background of the board is identical to the one found on 7800GTX (plastic "heatspreaders" on GDDR-3 memory, plastic stabilizator on to release strain on the PCB). So, to sum what we know about G71, possibly dubbed the 7800 Ultra: - 110nm process, modestly revised GPU - unexpected clockspeed (up till' this story, of course) - dual-slot aluminium cooling with at least four heatpipes - ultra-silent, large-fin large-diameter fan - 512 MB of GDDR-3 memory, provided by Samsung. Capacity of the chips: unknown Inq
