Further Down the GX2 Board

As already mentioned the NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 is quite different from the early Quad SLI capable GeForce 7900 GX2 cards. At the basics however both cards are quite similar in design, with both featuring a total of two PCB's put together to form the GX2. 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 circuitry, 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. The GeForce 7950 GX2 requires some extra power, in addition to the power that is supplied via the PCI Express slot which is common for a high-end graphics card. Notice that for the GeForce 7950 GX2 only one power connection is available.

The GeForce 7950 GX2 is a quite big card due to having two PCB's but isn't any longer than any other GeForce 7900 based card. This is quite an achievement, as the GeForce 7900 GX2 is quite a long card and required some extra space to fit into a computer case. With the customer version NVIDIA made sure the space constrain is no longer an issue for going for a GX2. On top of that the GeForce 7950 GX2 is less power hungry, advised is about 500-650W as power supply as a single GeForce 7950 GX2 requires about 143W.

Between both PCB's there is not that much room at all, and each PCB comes with a single slot cooling solution. The single slot cooling solution has been completely revised and redone. By doing so NVIDIA has been able to design a very effective though smaller heatsink to fit the GeForce 7950 GX2. The outer side of the GX2 has also been redone to meet the smaller design. The GeForce 7950 GX2 has the same size as a GeForce 7900 GTX which comes with a dual slot heatpipe cooling solution.

When looking a bit closer to the back of the GX2, it doesn't differ that much from a normal GeForce 7900 GTX neither. The central concentration of resistors highlights the location of the graphics processing unit. Originating from there we can see five different electronic highways that will interconnect the GPU with the memory chips and the BR3 bridge chip. Each PCB of the GeForce 7950 GX2 features 512MB frame buffer, leading up to a whooping 1GB memory for a 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. In contrast to the GeForce 7900 GX2, the position of the dual DVI and S-Video interface has been switched from the outer PCB to the inner PCB. By doing so the exhaust grill is now positioned between both PCB's which will elevate the airflow between both boards. NVIDIA has made sure that due to the redesign of the GX2 video card the thermal efficiency has increased over the early design.