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NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 1024MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Tuesday, 06 June 2006 |
Hexus comes with a review on the NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 1024MB PCIe graphics card. The race to build the ultimate Direct3D 9.0 accelerator isn't over yet. You might have thought that GeForce 7900 GTX and Radeon X1900 XTX were it, before both ATI and NVIDIA release next Direct3D capable chips and products built around them when Vista finally shows; and you'd be forgiven for thinking so, given the levels of image quality and performance on offer from the pair. NVIDIA think they've got something to take the top spot away from ATI Radeon X1900 XTX, after their GeForce 7900 GTX didn't quite move the game on enough to do so.
 NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 1024MB PCI-E Review
So does today's focus is the NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2, change enough to do the job that GeForce 7900 GTX hasn't, dethroning Radeon X1900 XTX as the compelling single board purchase on the PC right now? The GeForce 7950 GX2 isn't exactly a secret, given NVIDIA's wheezing, asthmatic attempt to bring the whole Quad SLI concept to market. The technology uses engineered GeForce boards that layer a pair of PCB's, each with its own GPU and memory for a single board SLI setup, which, when paired with another. The first iteration of those boards were big and beefy and available via system integrators only.
The GeForce 7950 GX2 is that same half of a Quad SLI setup, but for the time being it's being sold and supported in single board configuration mode only, with its own regular two-GPU SLI implementation. That there's a pair of G71 GPUs on each GX2 means the board has some interesting on-paper performance properties, when combined with SLI. Rather than make the tedious tabular comparison between GeForce 7950 GX2, GTX and Radeon X1900 XTX that you'll undoubtedly see elsewhere, we'll simply say that it's SLI of a full G71 configuration with 500/1200MHz clocks and 512MB attached.
Think seriously about what's been presented to you thus far, concerning the GeForce 7950 GX2, and you should come to a conclusion like this. The NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 is probably the most caveat-laden graphics purchase yet released. Are you willing to spend £450 on a single graphics board? You are? Brilliant, they're available today, you'll enjoy the framerates and overall image quality, happy shopping! Otherwise, it's quick when games support it, but not all do. And to actually keep it running nice and stable is a considerated exercise in component and chassis choices.
If the rumoured £450 is right, it's a good bit cheaper than the discrete multi-GPU setups on test, for a healthy slice of the performance, but it's very expensive for a single board and the caveats to run it make it almost impossible to sanely recommend. You'll have to do that bit of decision making yourself.
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