Another new graphics card from the NVIDIA has been released onto shop shelves today and again representing the green corner is XFX with the brand new GeForce 7950 GT. As if there wasn't already enough cards out there on the market to confuse us, NVIDIA thought they would turn around and sneak another one in there for us all. While at first due to the naming scheme you might think that the card is a dual core solution, much like the GeForce 7950 GX2, it certainly is not that. It is designed to sit above the older GeForce 7900 GT as far as performance goes and as far as pricing goes, it's going up directly against ATI's new designed Radeon X1900 XT 256MB graphics card. - TweakTown

XFX GeForce 7950 GT 512MB HDCP Extreme Review

The GeForce 7950 GT comes with 512MB worth of fast GDDR3 compared to just 256MB on the GeForce 7900 GT and has its core and memory clock speeds have increased quite a healthy margin. Using the larger box that we saw the GeForce 7950 GX2 use we have a pretty standard XFX layout happening. The front of the box comes with some stickers mentioning the key features of the card. We can see clearly that we are dealing with the Extreme model with a 570MHz core clock speed. It supports all our normal array of technology like SLI, HDTV and HDCP. But it is the first time XFX comes with a silent cooling design.

Clawing our way through to the card we found ourselves with something we have not yet seen from XFX before, a high-end overclocked silent graphics card. Looking straight at the card we have a big heatsink that covers the front of the card and two pipes that shoot out the top where the heat dissipates. The generally quality of the heatsink overall seems fairly good and looks like its going to cool the card sufficiently enough. Like the GeForce 7900 GS board, the card does require a PCI Express power connector since the motherboard cannot provide enough juice by itself.

Out of the box the XFX graphics card is already overclocked, which is a common feature for the Extreme edition. The stock speeds set by NVIDIA for the GeForce 7950 GT are 550MHz on the core and 1400MHz on the memory. XFX have increased this to 570MHz on the core and 1460MHz on the memory. Using CoolBits and detecting the optimal frequencies we were able to achieve a further 11MHz on the core bringing it to 581MHz and the memory was also increased to 1522MHz. While these aren't huge overclocks, we will see what happens and how it affects the scores and gaming performance.

NVIDIA's brand spanking new GeForce 7950 GT is a good graphics card. It's really what the older GeForce 7900 GT should have been in the first place. A full blown 512MB good performing but not ultra expensive graphics card! The GeForce 7950 GT is going to appeal to a few people. Those that want a 512MB graphics card and those people who are willing to spend an extra few dollars to venture into something a bit faster then the GeForce 7900 GT but not break the bank with a GeForce 7900 GTX. While the overclocking wasn't as pleasing as the GeForce 7900 GS, it might be due to the heatpipe technology that XFX have opted for.

The clock speeds are already quite high and fairly impressive, so that may be all we can expect out of the GeForce 7950 GT. All in all the new NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT is a good graphics card but it seems to be a bit of a stop gap measure. While ATI have released a new card, the Radeon X1900 XT 256MB that is slightly faster, NVIDIA are saying we are happy with our top-end but want to bring some more competitive pricing in the high-end market. Hence the release of the GeForce 7900 GS and GeForce 7950 GT video cards to the public.