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Gainward BLISS 7950 GX2 1024MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Monday, 19 June 2006 |
The Inquirer comes with a review on the Gainward BLISS 7950 GX2 1024MB PCIe
video card. We got hold of a NVIDIA retail GeForce 7950 GX2 card and played a
little with it. NVIDIA dropped the price to a reasonable sub €600, or around
£400 in the UK, so now this card really goes after ATI's Radeon X1900 XTX as a
single card rather than an attack on Radeon X1900 CrossFire systems. To make it
even more difficult for ATI, Gainward and NVIDIA cut the price further at press
time, down to €525, while ATI dropped the price of a single Radeon X1900 XTX to
€399 to stave off the attack from NVIDIA's new beast. This way the GeForce 7950
GX2 becomes quite affordable.
 Gainward BLISS
7950 GX2 1024MB PCI-E Review
The GeForce 7950 GX2 is not much more than a shorter version of the GeForce 7900 GX2 card. NVIDIA didn't notch up the wildest success with its Quad SLI systems powered with two GX2 cards but the new card is the way to fix it. The PCB is shorter and now this card can fit in most cases out there. NVIDIA is using two mobile G71 cores running at rather modest 500MHz core. Each core has 512MB of memory running at 1200MHz. We've seen faster speeds, but you have to consider that you have two chips to do the job and those two manage to outperform the single chip cards no matter how fast they are clocked.
Gainward's card looks pretty much like the reference card. Let's face it, no-one makes much difference on the higher-end cards as NVIDIA tightly controls their production. Gainward's BLISS 7950 GX2 comes in a nice and recognizable box. Gainward works hard on its BLISS brand and it is slowly regaining some of its old pride. We also noticed that once you turn optimal frequency on, the card overclocks to +550MHz core and +1400MHz memory. We knew that there is overclocking headroom in this mobile core powered Gainward BLISS 7950 GX2 but we didn't know it will be that much.
This is without a doubt the fastest card on the market. At €525 the Gainward BLISS 7950 GX2 should tie up a nice slice of the high-end market. It is simply faster than the GeForce 7900 GTX and it won't be much behind these in SLI config. There's no point yet buying two of these cards as there is no driver for it but it should be ready by the end of the summer. You can tweak the existing driver to make Quad SLI work but the performance is simply not there, at least not at this time. NVIDIA and Gainward did a great job with this card and this is the first higher-end card that distances itself from ATI's leading offerings.
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