XFX's GeForce 7950GX2 XXX

As we have already mentioned the card length comes in at a reasonable 9 inches. From a top down view, the cards really don't look all that different from a normal high-end graphics bar the small cooler.

We have a single PCI Express power connector in the normal top right position of the card and the normal array of circuitry all over the board. The top card does have the two DVI ports and S-Video port for HDTV out and what not.

What's interesting about the cards of such a high caliber is the small amount of cooling used - the heatsink included is quite large but thin with a small fan. You would think that because of the G71 core being utilized, it would need better cooling, or at least a copper heatsink. The good news is that it looks like there is a water block out there that will fit between the two cards.

The small cooler is made possible since the GeForce 7950GX2 actually has slower clock speeds than the GeForce 7900GTX which uses the same core revision GPU.

Overall the design is so much better then the previous model and while we would recommend a board like the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium, ASUS A8N32-SLI Premium or DFI Lanparty UT SLI DR Expert for a Quad SLI setup, thanks to the increased room between the PCI Express slots you don't actually need them.

And since the GeForce 7950GX2 is technology not SLI, you can run the graphics card on a lot of motherboards (around 40 have been confirmed, so far) with a single PCI Express graphics slot such as Intel 955x and 975x chipset based motherboards giving this SLI-like graphics card more freedom to use on a larger random of boards, and cheaper ones at that. For a complete list of compatible motherboards, download the "NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 - Motherboard Compatibility" PDF which we uploaded to our server, here