There are only 1,500 G71 based AGP cards

IF THERE ARE over 1,500 diehard AGP enthusiasts, out there, they might just start scrapping over who manages to get a card. As we reported here, the "BLISS 7800GS Silent 512MB GS+" is a product with a 90 nanometre G71 chip, bridged with the Nvidia BR02 chip.

24 pixel pipelines, 8 Vertex Shaders, 450 MHz core clock speed, 512MB of GDDR-3 memory using Infineon 1.4ns chips, Artic Cooling silent fan solution makes this, all in all, the fastest AGP unit on the block. The half of gig of video memory is clocked to 1250MHz, ending up with 40GB/s of memory bandwidth.

The 450/1250 clock is not the highest you can achieve. The limit on the GPU is set around 500MHz, since the BR02 chip showed that 500MHz clock is pretty much the maximum stable clock speed for the bridged GPU's. But there are always exceptions. The memory has a theoretical speed of 714MHz in DDR mode (1428 MHz), so you can expect to get a nice boost to bandwidth as well.

However, with the short supply of G71 chips, the company will probably only make 1,500 of them. The product does a good job serving as a demonstration of how good Gainward's engineering department is. µ