Date:
Tuesday , June 13, 2006
Author:
Brent Justice
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BFGTech GeForce 7950 GX2

Is BFG’s new GeForce 7950 GX2 the fastest single video card on the planet? [H] Enthusiast uses real-world gaming and massive 24” & 30” displays to show you what the GX2 is really all about. Canned benchmarks and smaller displays do not tell you the real 7950 story.

Introduction:

We all want the best gaming experience possible, right? When it comes to upgrading your video card, you want new features and power allowing more visual quality in your games along with seamless and fluid gameplay. NVIDIA’s SLI has been maturing at a good pace for the last year and their latest GPU configuration drives that fact home. The GeForce 7950 GX2 is not a new GPU, but rather a couple of 7900 series GPUs mated together in one product to deliver SLI performance to those system owners with just one X16 PCIe slot. That is right; you no longer even need a SLI motherboard to have SLI. The real beauty is that you don’t even need a motherboard with a NVIDIA chipset. The 7950 GX2 is for everyone.

While some of you may see this solution as extreme, and others will simply see it as extremely expensive, there is no doubt that the 7950 GX2 is exciting in the world of gaming. This is not exactly a first though. We have seen dual GPU video cards in the past from ASUS. HardOCP evaluated the ASUS Extreme N7800 GT Dual some time ago. This was a single PCB video card with two NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT GPUs on board. They were connected by an internal SLI connection. This allowed you to have GeForce 7800 GT SLI on one video card, although it still required the use of a motherboard with a NVIDIA SLI chipset. We found that the gameplay experience matched up perfectly with two separate GeForce 7800 GT video cards in SLI. However, due to heat and power requirements we did not see mass production of this solution.

NVIDIA is here today to show us however that this technology has matured and is now a viable solution. NVIDIA has re-designed the entire aspect of having two GPUs on one video card to make something that works easily with the latest generation GPUs.

Quad SLI?!?

There has been a lot of talk about Quad SLI and we have seen System Integrator products on the market from the likes of Dell and Falcon Northwest, but those were not using the GeForce 7950 GX2, but rather another incarnation of Quad SLI. So does the GeForce 7950 GX2 support Quad SLI? The answer to that is both, “Yes and no.” Let us explain.

Quad GPU SLI is officially not a supported platform in the do-it-yourself (DIY) market. What we mean by that is that Quad GPU SLI is not being announced or supported today by NVIDIA for anyone who wants to buy two GeForce 7950 GX2 video cards and use them in a Quad SLI configuration. What is being announced is Quad SLI for integrated system builders that supply an entire system certified to work with two GeForce 7950 GX2’s in SLI. As of publishing this, it is still unclear if you can purchase one.

The original NVIDIA plan was to have the GeForce 7950 GX2 announced now with the ability to use two in a SLI configuration allowing Quad SLI (four GPUs) for the DIY retail market. The plans have changed though. There are some issues NVIDIA is running into with getting two GeForce 7950 GX2’s working with all motherboards. There are issues with compatibility stemming from the system BIOS on motherboards. Issues revolve around the fact that the GeForce 7950 GX2 has its own PCI-Express switch onboard and the motherboard BIOS’ issues with identifying it properly. The result of which means no Quad SLI for now with two GeForce 7950 GX2 video cards in your system, officially. However in what is a very smart move, NVIDIA has not locked Quad SLI out of the driver allowing the more adventuresome computer DIYer to roll the dice. Of course we will try out Quad SLI anyway and see what blows up.