Introduction

While the appearance of graphics cards powered with the Quad SLI technology has been old news for a while with Dell's XPS 600 Renegade along with other various products from manufacturers that have exclusive access to the technology, consumers can now rejoice as well. The GeForce 7950 GX2 is the official name of NVIDIA's retail version of the GeForce 7900 GX2; the dual-GPU card that has been used by PC builders to create Quad SLI configurations for more then a month now. The GeForce 7900 GX2 has been exclusively available to only certain manufacturers and requires highly customized machines to operate the Quad SLI technology.

Recently NVIDIA has changed this with their GeForce 7950 GX2 which is smaller in comparison to the GeForce 7900 GX2 to allow for a Quad SLI setup in less specific cases. While one will still need a fairly large chassis and a tremendous power supply to support two of these dual chip graphics cards, one should be able to get Quad SLI up and running with a large enough case and the correct motherboard. Even though the card is designed for Quad SLI, you can start of with only one GeForce 7950 GX2 and add second card at a later stage to complete the Quad SLI configuration.

Taking the acclaimed NVIDIA SLI technology to the next level, Quad SLI delivers the most extreme HD gaming experience available on the PC. Combining the power of four NVIDIA GeForce 7900 graphics processing units (GPU's) with an NVIDIA nForce4 SLI based motherboard in a single system; Quad SLI lets you run your favorite games at an unbelievably high resolution of 2560x1600 while maintaining silky smooth frame rates. In addition, support for a new 32x anti-aliasing mode and 16x anisotropic filtering enable stunning visuals.

NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 1GB

To get Quad SLI on the road NVIDIA designed a special board which goes by the GX2 abbreviation. The first version of this Quad SLI implementation was shown by Dell some month ago with their famous Renegade system. The Dell XPS 600 Renegade system featured four GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB GPU's and four custom PCB's that had been attached together in pairs. To hold this giant quad PCB construction Dell used a mainboard based upon the nForce4 SLI X16 Intel edition.

The GeForce 7950 GX2

Some months later we saw the introduction of NVIDIA 90nm refresh graphics cards based upon the G71 chip, which is actually an optimized die shrink of the G70 core released last year. Just some weeks ago NVIDIA launched the GeForce 7900 series and with that also came the announcement of Quad SLI for all customers. Since then we have seen that NVIDIA worked hard in getting the dual-GPU card ready for production and so the GeForce 7900 GX2 was born. Since then the GX2 has been available only to system integrators, leaving the upgraders behind with empty hands. This changed with the introduction of the GeForce 7950 GX2, a redesigned shorter version of the GeForce 7900 GX2.

NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GX2 is a dual PCB adaptor that is directly derived from the GeForce 7900 GX2, which was already derived from the GeForce 7900 series graphics card. The GeForce 7950 GX2 takes two GeForce 7900 boards, and joins them via 16 PCI Express lanes. And there are 16 additional lanes which are routed to the motherboard out to the PCI Express adaptor. The GeForce 7900 GX2 was designed specifically for system integrators and as a result nothing was compromised for performance. However, the GeForce 7950 GX2 is designed to be the retail component, and as such a few things needed tweaking for retail sales.

Just as the GeForce 7900 GX2, the GeForce 7950 GX2 is build up out of two PCB's that are paired up together. So in essence you have a dual-GPU graphics card, based upon the GeForce 7900 core. However, only one of the PCB's has a PCI Express interface connection. The main difference is the size of the board. The PCB has been reduced quite a bit and is about the same length as the GeForce 7900 GTX card. NVIDIA used the extra time they spend on releasing the GeForce 7950 GX2 wisely into optimizing the design of their dual-GPU video card.

Upon turning the GeForce 7950 GX2 around, we get only at the back of the second board which comes with the PCI Express interface. From that angle the back of the card looks very familiar and resembles a lot to the GeForce 7900 GT board. Although on the GX2 the GPU is somehow decentralized, and slightly moved away from the PCI Express interface. At the top of the GeForce 7950 GX2 outer board we can see the SLI connector for Quad SLI operation.