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NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 (1024MB)
NVIDIA's new born .. a Siamese twin.

That's right people, come and see come and see! NVIDIA officially gave birth to Siamese twins today! I promise, I'll try not to make any twin jokes okay? So what is it about Siamese twins that makes them so special? Well they look alike, you feel for them yet they are a little peculiar aren't they? And yes that's exactly what is going on with today's tested products. And I do say products as we will be testing both the NVIDIA reference design GeForce 7950 GX2 and XFX GeForce 7950 GX2 "XXX" edition, which obviously is a pre-overclocked version of the reference model of the card.

So I started the first paragraph of this review with a word that I do not use that much on graphics cards, peculiar. As this concept of graphics cards is rather unique. It's no secret, thanks to to fundamentally disturbed websites that constantly do everything to try and leak details about undisclosed products you already know what the product is about. NVIDIA's double-whammy GeForce 7950 GX2 is marketed as a "single" card design, where any infant obviously can see that this "single" card is nothing more than two cards merged together in SLI mode. The two PCB's with a little bridge in-between them gives a pretty strong idea about that.

I'm still a little confused as to why it was not possible to mount two GPU's on one PCB (one card) as at CeBit exhibit some board partners (which I can not disclose at this time) were showing dual 7800 GT's and GTX's on one PCB already. The answer from NVIDIA is plain and simple, the PCB (the card's print board) would become really long, too long. I'm not sure about that but hey NVIDIA's engineers obviously are way more knowledgeable then I am and I'm sure it's a pretty good reason. We'll talk more about the design later on in this review though with the guidance of some high-resolution photo's.

The GeForce 7950 GX2 (GX2 from now on) is targeted directly at ATI's delicious Radeon X1900 XTX and obviously does that job extremely well. Compared in NVIDIA's own line of graphics card solutions and with a price tag of roughly 599 to 650 USD/EUR the card will performance wise position itself "exactly" in-between a GeForce 7900 GTX 512Mb and two GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB in SLI mode. I phoned some board partners, they have the products in stock and you can expect a price of 649 EUR here in Europe.

So there you have our brief introduction, wanna go in depth with me? Good. Over the next dozen or two of pages we'll tell you all about this Siamese twin. We'll look at both the reference design and a pre-overclocked XFX card. Since one and one is two and the fact that I'm rather curious by nature, we'll also set these cards up in Quad SLI configuration. Which I must add NVIDIA is not supporting at all at this time. Even though the card is designed for Quad SLI, there will not be any four-GPU support at the time of launch with the GeForce 7950 GX2 due to massive driver constraints. It's just me and my crazy thing for hardware.

Follow me please, to the next page.