Further Down the GX2 Board

Let's move on with how the card looks and feels. As already mentioned this is actually a dual slot card due to the fact of having two PCB's paired up together. To get this all packed up as one physical graphics card NVIDIA has outfitted only one board with the PCI Express connection and fits both PCB's firmly to each other.

Each PCB has its own power connector, heatsink cooling an NVIDIA G71 processing chip and 512MB of GDDR3 memory. So for a full Quad SLI system you will need to pair up two of these cards in SLI, which lead of having four G71's and a total of 2GB total memory as frame buffer space. Each board needs two power connections, in addition to the power that can be supplied via the single bus slot.

The GeForce 7900 GX2 is a quite big card due to having two PCB's but on top of that it is pretty long as well. That all adds up in the space that this card takes up into a computer case, so a suitable chassis will be needed to house the pair. On top of that these cards will require some decent amount of power, advised is about 600-800W as power supply.

Between both PCB's there is not that much room at all, and each PCB comes with a single slot cooling solution. The cooling solution is a bit different from the current GeForce 7900 series of video cards but resembles more towards that of the GeForce 7800 GS. On the GeForce 7800 GS we had a single slot cooling solution that was a bit bigger due to the fact that it had to take care of the GPU, memory chips and the BR2 bridge chip.

The heatsink on both PCB's is the same and covers both the GPU and memory chips. Each PCB comes with 512MB of capacity and these memory chips are placed on one side only. This gives a total of 1GB memory for each GeForce 7900 GX2. By pairing up two GX2 cards and going for Quad SLI you will have 2GB at your disposal.

You can find a dual DVI and S-Video output on the rear I/O plate. Together with a heat exhaust grill you can find back an extra space is left open which used to bear an external power connection. Since each board has its own power connection, the external connection has been left out. It is a little funny to see the exhaust grill as the airflow is not exactly ducted entirely to this exit which kind of drops the thermal efficiency it could possess.