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XFX GeForce 7950 GX2 XXX 1024MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Tuesday, 06 June 2006 |
Guru3D shares their review on the XFX GeForce 7950 GX2 XXX 1024MB PCIe graphics card. Some great news, as NVIDIA officially gave birth to Siamese twins today! It is official, the NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 is the new high-end video card that needs to beat the competition. The GeForce 7950 GX2 is targeted directly at ATI's delicious Radeon X1900 XTX and obviously does that job extremely well. Compared in NVIDIA's own line of graphics card solutions and with a price tag of roughly $599-650 the card will performance wise position itself exactly in-between a GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB and two GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB in SLI mode.
 XFX GeForce 7950 GX2 XXX 1024MB PCI-E Review
Since one and one is two and the fact that I'm rather curious by nature, we'll also set these cards up in Quad SLI configuration. Which I must add NVIDIA is not supporting at all at this time. Even though the card is designed for Quad SLI, there will not be any four-GPU support at the time of launch with the GeForce 7950 GX2 due to massive driver constraints. It's just me and my crazy thing for hardware. So the GeForce 7950 GX2, the card is based on the G71 GPU. The G71 is the same graphics core as the GeForce 7900 GTX uses and is based on that newer 90nm fabrication process.
When placing two PCB's close together heat will become a factor to take into consideration as there is a lot less airflow. So to compensate and obviously to make sure it's not competing with the GeForce 7900 GTX SLI config, the graphics core of the GeForce 7950 GX2 has been downclocked to 500MHz. That's a pretty huge difference. By lowering the core clock the internal voltage probably was lowered a bit also, thus that would result into lower temps. The GeForce 7950 GX2 takes two GTX boards, and joins them via 32 PCI Express lanes. Sixteen lanes are routed to the motherboard out to the PCI Express adaptor.
The second factor we need to take a look at is obviously memory. The GeForce 7950 GX2 is armed with one gigabyte of GDDR3 memory, more precisely 2x 512MB and I say this specifically as 2x memory is cloned in SLI mode and thus effectively is 512MB of memory per GPU. This memory is running at a 600MHz memory clock frequency so its DDR will effectively serve you a 1200MHz memory frequency, which again is a lot slower than the big GeForce 7900 GTX card. Since this is marketed as a single card solution, you will still need a compatible motherboard to run the GX2, as this is a single board running in SLI mode.
I have to mention this, Quad SLI. Seriously if you are considering picking up two of the GeForce 7950 GX2 cards, then please don't! Quad SLI technology is not ready and I'm honestly not sure if it ever will be. NVIDIA knows this and is only selling Quad SLI to system builders. The GeForce 7950 GX2 is really a Siamese twin it's a tad weird to look at but you'll definitely get used to it and most of all like it. It offers a stack load of breathtaking performance and sits performance wise right between a GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB and that same card doubled up in SLI mode.
If that is not enough for you then NVIDIA makes sure you'll have plenty of headroom left for some serious overclocking. We pushed the frequencies to well over 600MHz on the core and close to 1600MHz on the memory. With such clocks you are getting dangerously close to the GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB in SLI mode. And although the price of $600-650 will make my neck hair grow inwards, it's a really extensive amount of performance you'll receive for your hard earned dough. If it suits your budget then the GeForce 7950 GX2 most definitely is something to look out for.
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