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Leadtek WinFast PX7950 GX2 1024MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Monday, 17 July 2006 |
The Inquirer brings us a review on the Leadtek WinFast PX7950 GX2 1024MB PCIe graphics card. Leadtek has made graphics cards for ages. It has its well established WinFast brand that Foxconn wanted to take away at one point but now it is clear that Leadtek is here to stay and that Foxconn actually wants to make its own brand. The company is the only one to sell Quadro cards in Asia and apart from its strong graphics business it sells some GPS devices, VoIP phones and some other interesting marchitectures. The Leadtek WinFast PX7950 GX2 comes with a quite long commercial name and at press time in Germany it only costs €521.
Leadtek WinFast PX7950 GX2 1024MB PCI-E Review
This is possibly the fastest card you can buy for the money but let's wait for that conclusion till we get to benchmarks. The card has two G71M cores working at 500MHz each, it has two times 512MB GDDR3 memory working at 1200MHz. It also supports two DVI slots, TV out and it is of course PCI Express card. You can also overclock it but this card is set at the stock speed. It is interesting to hear that the card supports Quad SLI configuration but at press time there is still no driver that can make it stabile. NVIDIA promised the driver till the end of the summer and we are getting there.
Usually conclusions are very hard. When you compared top end ATI and top end NVIDIA you usually end up in scenario where the both cards are very close in performance and one wins some benchmarks while the other one wins the other ones. This time it's not the case. I can clearly say GeForce 7950 GX2 based Leadtek WinFast PX7950 GX2 kits ATI's Radeon X1900 XTX but in every single scenario. If you want to turn the FSAA on and to play at higher resolution this is the card for you. At €521 it is reasonable expensive and will definitely be the fastest card the money can buy for at least a few more moths.
It runs at least twenty percent faster than ATI, it rises to forty percent advantage and in Doom 3 it runs even seventy percent faster. Performance wise Leadtek's WinFast PX7950 GX2 is the fastest non overclocked card around. The only disadvantage is lack of HDR and FSAA capability which is a shame but if you want the performance this is the card for you. NVIDIA caught ATI sleeping and its dual chip single card is the winning combination for this summer. ATI don't have the horces to fight it properly until end of September while we expect to see the new R580+ based Radeon X1950 XTX card out.
But beware the G80 chip should be out at the same time. Somehow NVIDIA is going to be once again one step ahead of ATI. Of course all will depend on how the performance will end up. Until then the GeForce 7950 GX2 cards are the fastest one that money can buy.
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