Graphics cards

Contained here is the answer to the ultimate question: how many stream processors does it take to render a lightbulb?

NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2

Manufacturer:	Price:
	£0 No longer on sale
Reviewer:	Review Date:
James Gorbold and Chris Lee	Jul 2007

	OVERALL RATING

SCORE

Not Rated

Verdict: The best DirectX 9 graphics card there is.

The GeForce 7950 GX2 was the first mass-produced graphics card to provide two on-board GPUs since the 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 way back in 2000, and was released to counter ATi's Radeon X1950XTX.

Each GPU resides on its own PCB and is accompanied by its own complement of 512MB of GDDR3 memory. The two PCBs are held together by several large bolts and an SLI interconnect. Thanks to the addition of a PCI-E bridge, the 7950 GX2 works in most motherboards with a 16x PCI-E slot, not just SLI-certified motherboards. However, if you do have an SLI motherboard, and you're completely mad, then you could install two 7950 GX2s in SLI. The GPUs themselves are based on the GeForce Go 7900-series GPUs for laptops, and have 24 pixel processors, 24 texture processors, eight vertex pipes and 16 ROPs. As a result of its laptop origins, the 7950 GX2 GPUs consume far less power than most high-end GPUs. Each GPU is clocked at 500MHz and is supported by 512MB of GDDR3 memory running at 600MHz (1.2GHz effective).

The performance of the 7950 GX2 varies enormously depending on how well optimised a game is for SLI; this can range from being incredibly well optimised to not being optimised at all. For example, Need for Speed: Carbon uses only one of the two GPUs, which means that the 7950 GX2 performs mid-way between the 7900 GT and 7900 GTX. However, in SLI-optimised titles such as F.E.A.R. and S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the 7950 GX2 was much more impressive, easily managing to play the former at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4x AA and 16x AF, and the latter at 1,680 x 1,050 with AA and AF enabled. Despite the insubstantial-looking cooling fans (which have the benefit of low noise levels), the 7950 GX2 is pretty overclockable. The GPUs on our test card were happy to run at 585MHz, while both sets of 512MB RAM overclocked to 690MHz (1.38GHz effective), boosting the minimum frame rate in F.E.A.R. by almost eight per cent.

Although it's no longer possible to buy a 7950 GX2, our tests show that this innovative graphics card is capable of delivering smooth frame rates in the latest shader-heavy games at high resolutions. As such, until DirectX 10 games start to take over, the 7950 GX2 is as good as DirectX 9 hardware will ever get.

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