As we roll into June like every year it is very exciting. Why? It is Computex time again and while I am sitting here at our labs in Australia and not in Taipei, I find myself not all that phased because we get to play with something hands on that is a bit more exiting then a plane trip.
Only a couple days ago at Computex, nVidia launched GeForce 7950GX2 - we all know about it, we even knew about them before the 7900GX2 was available but just how good is nVidia’s second attempt at SLI on a “single card” going to be? We shouldn’t call the GeForce 7950GX2 an SLI part but that’s pretty much what it is. The 7900GX2 which we looked at last month had some niggling issues but overall wasn’t too bad when gauged as a sign of what’s to come.
There is a bit of talk around about the 7950GX2 though - while anyone will be able to go out and buy two GeForce 7950GX2 cards which will result in a total of four GPU cores (or Quad SLI), will you be able to run them?
We still aren’t sure as unfortunately we still have not got that far thanks to the huge pain in the butt it has been to set the thing up. We put one card in initially (two cores, so we are clear!) and started benching; we were going all fine then after a reboot after a number of benchmarks, it went all down hill. BSOD, freezes in Windows install, freezes getting into Windows, crashes after driver install and more. Installing an older card like the 7800GTX found the system running no problems for a while then it all started over again. At the moment though we think it has come down to four things - the 7950GX2 being a bit of a pain, two Hitachi hard drives look like they have died, our beloved A8N32 seems to be no more and a bit of bad luck.
The good news is we have now got another Hitachi drive, three more GeForce 7950 and a brand new DFI Expert motherboard which would not have been made possible without the help of some local suppliers. We will go into more detail on the system in a few pages, though. In the mean time, let’s have a look at exactly what we are dealing with this time around and if nVidia has delivered a new graphics card which is worth considering!
