Product Listing

NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 1GB

By Vijay Anand - 5 Jun 2006

Conclusion

Conclusion

Having seen NVIDIA's pursuit of Quad SLI and the likes, it is without a doubt their goal is to be the industry performance leader. Drawing from their Quad SLI design ecosystem, NVIDIA applied that engineering into delivering an ideal two-slot graphics within the footprint of the GeForce 7900 GTX, but making sure this new card delivered the absolute best performance possible. The GeForce 7900 GTX with its already high clock speeds is almost at its seams and it isn't feasible to pump it further within reasonable and safe means to achieve a mass-market product.

Thus instead of scaling clocks, NVIDIA went parallel by incorporating two boards with an internal SLI connection between them. With clock speeds of 500/1200MHz per board and a combined 1GB total frame buffer, this is a product that would at the very minimum match the performance of a GeForce 7900 GT in SLI mode. However, when you crank up image quality settings and set high antialiasing levels, the large frame buffer of the GeForce 7950 GX2 simply shines as depicted in the forward looking F.E.A.R game. Expect up to 50% or more performance gains over the GeForce 7900 GTX and the GeForce 7900 GT in SLI in such game settings. More upcoming games embracing all the newer technology developments such as F.E.A.R would only mean that you'd require graphics cards of the GeForce 7950 GX2 caliber for high visual quality.

The GeForce 7950 GX2 is also aimed at those looking to maximize their huge visual displays that run at very high native resolutions, beyond even 1600x1200. At such setting, even a reasonable degree of antialiasing would quickly consume huge amounts of memory and would require a speedy graphics card solution to tackle that. Even with an internal SLI-like configuration the GeForce 7950 GX2, this card is designed to work on any system with a PCIe graphics slot and will not require any SLI settings (or rather it is seamlessly taken care of in the background), thus it is not platform dependent. However, due to the PCI Express Switch integrated on the card, it would require motherboards to have an updated BIOS to detect the GeForce 7950 GX2 graphics card correctly. This is the only catch for the moment, but it's an issue that should fade away if all major motherboard vendors dutifully address this concern as soon as possible.

Albeit the GeForce 7950 GX2 is actually two cards sandwiched as one, heat output is not really a major concern for this class of cards as we've seen worse with the some of ATI's high-end cards. It is however still expected that adopters should have good airflow within their system as a prerequisite to consideration. And it's not difficult to achieve that. The other concern that goes hand-in-hand is noise. In this aspect, we were delighted to note of its quiet operation; in fact, it felt like there was only a single GeForce 7900 GT operating instead of the duo-card GeForce 7950 GX2. Simply said, NVIDIA has tackled all grounds to deliver the GeForce 7950 GX2 and they've done that rather gracefully, despite the bulky two-card build. In fact, it is even lighter than a GeForce 7900 GTX. One thing to note is that GeForce 7950 GX2 does not eclipse the GeForce 7900 GTX in SLI mode, but if you are looking at the best 'single-card' solution, this is it.

The expected stock price of the GeForce 7950 GX2 is about US$599 and that's actually about the same price as when the GeForce 7900 GTX first debuted, or for that matter, equivalently priced to a pair of GeForce 7900 GT cards now. Considering its capabilities, quiet operation, decent thermal output profile and of course its added performance advantage, there's hardly any other suitable contender to rival it on all aspects (let alone one). Verdict: Highly recommend, so long as your motherboard's BIOS is updated enough to flawlessly work with the GeForce 7950 GX2.

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