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EVGA e-GeForce 7950 GX2 1024MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Wednesday, 07 June 2006 |
GamePyre brings us a review on the EVGA e-GeForce 7950 GX2 1024MB PCIe graphics card. The GeForce 6800 series, returning NVIDIA to the feature and performance leadership they've enjoyed historically. This chip was the first to fully support Shader Model 3.0 functionality. NVIDIA refreshed their Shader Model 3.0 parts with the GeForce 7 series that was released of last year. In between, NVIDIA launched the nForce4 SLI chipset, allowing two supported video cards to work together improving performance in games. Based upon this SLI technology comes a new toy from NVIDIA, namely the GeForce 7950 GX2 with dual-GPU's on one single graphics card.
 EVGA e-GeForce 7950 GX2 1024MB PCI-E Review
The EVGA e-GeForce 7950 GX2 card is a standard length PCB, about as long of the GeForce 7800 GTX series of last year. If you look at the side of the card and the cooling, it's pretty clear the GeForce 7950 GX2 consists of two GeForce 7900 chips fit on a PCB and to each other connected by several screws. The cooling on the card is constructed out of a heatsink on each graphics chip and a small fan on the bottom right portion of each PCB. Meaning that both PCB's have a single slot cooling solution and that the card is following a dual sot design, but featuring two GPU's.
The GeForce 7950 GX2 is a native PCI Express card and requires 143W of power at peak, more than the 75W that can be provided by the PCI Express interface. One thing to notice on the card is the SLI bridge connector on the PCB. Currently NVIDIA drivers do not support Quad SLI in their drivers. A later driver release in the next month or so will enable retail purchasers to buy two of these GeForce 7950 GX2 cards and SLI them, giving four chips operating in SLI on a single motherboard. It'll be interesting to see what four G71 chips will be able to do in terms of raw gaming performance.
The e-GeForce 7950 GX2 from EVGA is clocked at the default rate of 500MHz for the core and 1200MHz for the memory. Each chip has 24 pixel shaders, meaning the combination gives a total of 48 pixel shader pipelines. Likewise there are 16 vertex shaders and a total of 32 outputted pixels a second from the GeForce 7950 GX2. With two GeForce 7900 chips, the GeForce 7950 GX2 has 1GB of GDDR3 memory total. Each G71 chip has 512MB of memory assigned to it, with a 256-bit memory bus. EVGA generally gives austere game bundles with the cards they sell and the e-GeForce 7950 GX2 card is no exception.
NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GX2 is a logical extension of SLI in putting two cards on a single board and does its job well. Advantages of the card include higher performance than any other single video card on the market. Once NVIDIA releases the driver for SLI of two of the GeForce 7950 GX2's, it will likely outperform anything on the market. The EVGA e-GeForce 7920 GX2 card is default clocked for both the core and memory. However, there will be overclocked cards from EVGA coming in the near future. For now, if you're looking for the absolute fastest performing single video card on the market, this is it!
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