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MSI GeForce 7950 GX2 1024MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Monday, 26 June 2006 |
Coming from t-break is a review on the MSI GeForce 7950 GX2 1024MB PCIe graphics card. A year or so back, if you wanted to have more than one CPU in your system, you had to go buy a separate CPU and make sure your mainboard had more than one CPU socket to get it installed and working. Dual core CPU's threw that twenty year old notion out the door. With the GeForce 7950 GX2, NVIDIA is doing something similar today. While the GeForce 7950 GX2 is technically a single card in the sense that it only requires one PCI Express slot to work, it is made up of two GPU's connected via a custom developed PCI Express switch by NVIDIA that directs the bidirectional PCI Express connection from the system to both GPU's.
 MSI GeForce 7950 GX2 1024MB PCI-E Review
Each of the two G71 cores has access to its own dedicated 512MB memory so while the total amount of RAM is 1GB, its not shared between the two GPU's. According to NVIDIA the GeForce 7950 GX2 consumes a maximum of 143 watts which is much lower than an SLI or CrossFire solutions. With us today, we have the GeForce 7950 GX2 provided to us by MSI. The card itself is basically the same beast as the NVIDIA reference card. It's a two slot solution with two PCB's with a core of each one of them. An SLI connector is present on one of the PCB's for a Quad SLI setup.
If the GeForce 7950 GX2 is looked at as a single card, which it technically is, then you have one hell of a fast card. All the games we tested seem to run fastest on the GeForce 7950 GX2 and the fact that you don't need an SLI motherboard makes it a very attractive option. We were also impressed by the generally noise free operation of the GeForce 7950 GX2 and about the only time the fans went on full speed was when we didn't have the power cable connected. The card also doesn't consume that much power, as stated by NVIDIA the card requires about 143W to operate and perform at full speed.
There is one limitation that we're not too fond of and this is losing the ability to power a multi-monitor setup. This is a problem that exists with all SLI systems and hopefully NVIDIA should get past that. Other than that, the GeForce 7950 GX2 is a kick ass product and we would certainly put one on our wish list along with Intel's Core 2 Duo processor.
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