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Quad SLI - GeForce 7950 GX2 Squared!

By Vijay Anand - 5 Jun 2006

Excellent Performance x 2 = Spectacular?

Excellent Performance x 2 = Spectacular?

Well we've just shown you in our last article exactly how powerful the GeForce 7950 GX2 can be and what's it made of. We also shared with you that even though the GeForce 7950 GX2 ships with the SLI gold finger connector at top of the card, the current driver version officially supporting this new SKU (ForceWare version 91.29) does not support SLI – thus disallowing Quad SLI capability (pairing another GeForce 7950 GX2). However, a previous driver version did have all the correct ID strings that matched that of a GeForce 7950 GX2 and we found out that this version still had SLI support available for all cards. Loaded with the 91.27 driver version and the GeForce 7950 GX2, here's how the system identified the card:-

In the basic Display Properties, the graphics card was identified by its string ID and not by its proper name.

However delving further in, the GeForce 7950 GX2 was correctly recognized here.

Upon successful detection, we popped in a pair of GeForce 7950 GX2 graphics card, and we had SLI up and running. The secondary GeForce 7950 GX2 graphics card came by the way of MSI and was a near carbon copy of the reference card. We'll take a look at MSI's version in detail in the next article, but for now, this piece of information is more than adequate for the purpose of demonstrating Quad SLI with NVIDIA's latest fangled toy.

Take note that NVIDIA currently does not support Quad SLI for end-user DIY systems unless offered by a qualified OEM vendor such as Dell's five-figure priced monster machine. NVIDIA cites intricate matters such as latencies and timing concerns of operating a Quad SLI setup without proper qualification testing. However, they have also acknowledged that with proper lab testing, eventually such motherboard level kinks can be ironed out via an appropriate BIOS update and/or a more adept driver to tackle the problem effectively. Furthermore, improperly configured systems could show a negative impact rather than a positive impact as Quad SLI is especially for the elite folks with extreme-performance systems. Oddly, there's a good bunch of these extreme gamers that actually know what they are doing and what they need, yet are denied of such goodies other than settling for a ready-made system. A shame indeed, but at least that's how the business and economics are working out at the moment.

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