Preliminary GeForce 7950GX2 reference benchmarks

Details of Nvidia's upcoming top-of-the-range GeForce 7950 GX2 SLI graphics card have slipped out ahead of the part's launch, expected to take place early next month at the Computex show in Taipei, Taiwan. According to a DailyTech report, the card contains two 7900 GTX GPUs each clocked at 500MHz. There's 1GB of GDDR 3 SDRAM - 512MB per core, presumably - on board clocked to 600MHz (1.2GHz effective). The NVIDIA GeForce 7950GX2 graphics card will launch on June 6, and will retail for $599-649.

NVIDIA's GeForce 7950GX2 is a dual PCB adaptor that is directly derived from the GeForce 7900GX2, which was already derived from the GeForce 7900GTX ASIC. GeForce 7950GX2 takes two GeForce 7900GTX boards, and joins them via 32 PCIe lanes. 16 additional lanes are routed to the motherboard out to the PCIe adaptor. The GeForce 7900GX2 was designed specifically for OEM system builds and as a result nothing was compromised for performance. However, GeForce 7950GX2 is designed to be the retail component, and as such a few things needed tweaking for retail sales.

For example, the cooler on the 7900GX2 has been drastically redesigned and reduced for the 7950GX2. Gone is the large copper heatsink/fan combo in favor of a much smaller aluminum heatsink with a more powerful fan. Furthermore, the majority of the mosfets and capacitors positioned at the rear of the card have been moved toward the DVI inputs instead, allowing engineers to cut down the size of the PCB substantially, down to nine inches. It's also important to note that the SLI bridge is not present on the 7950GX2.

Apparently, this is simply a cheaper way to run an SLI configuration, which makes perfect sense, since (according to the article) that's basically what it is: Two cards soldered together in SLI with a hard-wired bridge and a single bus. You even have to have an SLI motherboard to use it. It shouldn't be any faster than two 7900GTX's - it is two 7900GTX's! The only REAL difference is the price...This is an excellent example of a marketing department doing its job.