eVGA 7950GX2 - Power And Then Some - Closer Look, Test Setup and Info

Closer Look:

The 7950GX2 is unlike any card made in the past.  It uses a PCB for each GPU and memory and is hardware SLI'd through the use of a connector.  This card will be recognized as a single Display Adapter by Windows, and as such you can add two of these monsters to your rig for Quad SLI.  We only have one card to play with today, and it is by far the coolest piece of hardware we've seen around the shop for a while.

We use the term "cool" rather loosely as this card kicks off a whole bunch of heat.  If you live is a cold building, I recommend that you leave the side of your case off so that you can use this card as an auxiliary heater.  It get's darn hot and you can see why below.

Breathing Room - Skinny

There is not a lot of room between the cooling fan of the primary card and the PCB of the secondary card.  In you want to get out a caliper and measure; you'll find that there is only 0.150" between the two.  I immediately wondered how loud these two coolers would be to effectively remove the heat from the GPU and memory and surprisingly, they are virtually silent when running 2D apps, and spin up according to heat load.  There never made that much noise at all during testing - even after hours of gaming and 3DMark loops.  When the GPU is idle we recorded temps around 55C and when running full load we did top out at 81C.  That's a little too hot for my liking, but thankfully the card remained quiet.

Check out the next few pictures as we've taken apart the card to show how it lays out.  The pictures below also show the connector that links the two cards together.

Before we jump into testing we'll take a quick look at the test setup and some testing information.

Test Setup:

The tests were done using the system below.

For the comparison tests on the following page we simply swapped out the graphics cards - performed a reinstall of the drivers (which were the latest official drivers during testing) and re-ran the tests with the new card.  Below is a chart of resolutions and quality settings we used in our tests.

Keep in mind that the benchmarks reflect real world gaming as our Minimum, Average and Maximum numbers were all gathered by using FRAPS and performing repeated runs through levels to gain consistent accurate results.

Overclocking:

The eVGA 7950GX2 comes clocked in at 500MHz on the core and a nice toasty 1200MHz on the memory.  Using Coolbits and the "autodetect" option, the card was boosted to 550MHz/1400MHz.  We managed to push things a bit farther and finally settled on a rock solid 590MHz/1500MHz.  The core came up 18% and the memory managed to run 25% above stock.  These aren't the best results around the web, but this is a full retail card and reflects more accurately what you can expect with a card you pick up at your local computer store.

With that being said, let's take a look at some benchmarks on the next page.