Aaah young one, we meet again, impressive is what this new rascal is. From a pure optical point of view, you'll have to get used to the design of two PCB's mounted together as yeah... it is weird looking. From a practical point of view, hey SLI has been pretty well refined and is working extremely well. The result of all the SLI developments over the past year or two made NVIDIA decide to introduce a card like this. Obviously today we are talking about your gaming experience as that's what this card is made for but obviously any Series 7 feature to date is present in this product, something you should not forget at all. All that and more performance. Please keep in mind that you need a serious processor to go along with this card. SLI requires a lot in terms of your machine. But hey thats the high-end experience you choose for. On the topic of practical, I do have one concern. It's heat. You now have two cards disposing loads of heat into your PC, and not outside your PC. Your uber gaming rig needs to be well ventilated, please bare that in mind.

I have to mention this, Quad SLI. Seriously if you are considering picking up two of the GX2's, then please don't! Quad SLI is not ready and I'm honestly not sure if it ever will be. We tried most possible software, yet in almost any case the game reverted back to utilizing one GPU, there was one exception, which was the title F.E.A.R and it was showing a good 20% additional performance at a pretty high resolution of 1920x1200. Sure it'd be best to test software on a spanking new 30" 2560x1600 screen .. but realistically ? Who has one let alone can afford it ? Seriously, 20% for another 650 bucks? Come on, no way. Don't bet on Quad SLI as it's a waste of money at this time. NVIDIA knows this and is only selling Quad SLI to system builders. Why did I test it then you ask ? Well I know there's a hand full of people who will be reading articles like these and realizing that Quad SLI is very possible with an nForce 590 SLI system and two of these cards. The SLI connectors are on it and with a little tweaking your drivers will support it also. Pure curiosity would make such people buy two of these cards and you'd be seriously disappointed. Keep an eye on Guru3D.com's articles. If Quad SLI finally is a viable option, we'll be the first to let you know, until then say sayonara to it.

And then another dilemma comes to my mind, Windows Vista. With upcoming high-end graphics cards for the remainder of this 2006 season I just have to mention it. The graphics industry is moving on. 2006 will be the last year of DirectX 9, with the launch of Windows Vista in 2007 DirectX 10 will be the next big thing, and it is quite big. I am a little fascinated with DirectX 10. One of the biggest differences will be the forced implementation of what is called Unified Shader Architecture and UDA really is all about performance and efficiency. I'll explain it very simply: often in games at random point's your Vertex shader processors are utilized like 50% and the pixel shaders processors 90%. So bluntly explained at that point you have 60% of your computational capacity in the GPU being unused. That's what's going to change, no more separate pixel, vertex shader or geometry processors inside the graphics core. These will be merged and thus your GPU will be way more efficient and as a result can produce higher performance levels.  It requires a completely new thinking in GPU architecture. XBOX 360 for example already uses this method. Why am I mentioning this? Every card to date is simply not DirectX 10 ready. Sure, your card will be working fine in Windows Vista, yet it'll be in DX9 compatibility mode. It's seriously something to consider if you are opting to spend such high amounts of money on a graphics card solution when we are at the verge of something new and exciting.

That being said it's very unlikely that game programmers will limit themselves to DX10 only, so I obviously do expect to see large and extensive support for backwards compatibility.

Back to the reality of today as it's time to wrap up this article. The GeForce 7950 GX2 is really a Siamese twin it's a tad weird to look at but you'll definitely get used to it and most of all like it. It offers a stack load of breathtaking performance and sits performance wise right between a GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB and that same card doubled up in SLI mode. And that's not a bad performance spot to be in folks (Ed: It will also only take up 2 slots instead of 4, leaving many of you with PCI slots available that are often blocked)!

If that is not enough for you then NVIDIA makes sure you'll have plenty of headroom left for some serious overclocking. We pushed the frequencies to well over 600 MHz on the core and close to 800 MHz  on the memory. With such clocks you are getting dangerously close to the GeForce 7900 GTX 512Mb in SLI mode. And although the price of 600-650 USD will make my neck hair grow inwards, it's a really extensive amount of performance you'll receive for your hard earned dough.

XFX on their terms is doing what a lot of manufacturers will be offering. Pre-overclocked graphics cards. Be aware that you will pay premium price for this, but then again the card comes factory overclocked and thus you'll have no issues with your warranty if it decides to fail on you. The XFX "XXX" edition card was a pleasure to test though, this surely is adult entertainment :) Suffice to say we had no stability issues or weird experiences at all. The pre-overclock definitely makes a good difference when it comes to performance. The card itself combined with it's Tomb raider Legend bundle comes highly recommended. In fact we think the bundle plus the high clocks deserve some sort of recognition. Therefore we give it our editor's choice award.

So there we have it. This product is the direct result of the immense success that was introduced two years ago, SLI. If it suits your budget then the GX2 most definitely is something to look out for. It's friggin fast and offers every little feature the graphics industry offers at the moment. You'll be playing games at a quality level and resolution that is just in one word: marvelous. During that gaming experience every few minutes you'll need to wipe of a little drop of drool from your mouth; this solution offers a seriously exciting gaming experience.

+++ ATH

Product:	NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 1024 MB gDDR3
Manufacturer:	NVIDIA
Information:	nvidia.com
Street price:	599 to 649 USD/EUR

 

Product:	NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 "XXX" Edition 1024 MB gDDR3
Manufacturer:	XFX
Information:	XFX Graphics
Street price:	649 USD/EUR

Update: I wrote an error on page 2 by saying that this card requires a SLI capable mainboard. This is not the case and has been corrected. The GeForce 7950 GX2 will require a PCI-Express x16 mainboard with the latest BIOS that is compatible with this product. Right now there are many mainboards to choose from, please visit this link for an overview of compatible mainboards and the BIOS update needed.