Albatron 7950 GX2

There is only one card in this picture. No, really. Okay, let’s discuss this.

Behold: the Albatron flavored 7950 GX2. It consists of two PCBs that each house a G71 GPU, 512 MB RAM, all the usual refinements including HDCP playback and, most importantly, a chunky bridge between the PCBs. This bridge will -- you guessed it -- make both the PCBs function as one. So between this and the single PCI-e slot that feeds the two data, rest assured that there is only one card in this picture.

It’s really SLI on a single card, manufactured such that you use only one PCI-e 16x slot, which frees up your precious spare PCE-e slots for other things. Take the example we’re all excited about, namely using a second PCI-e 16x slot to drop in another 7950 GX2 and move to quad SLI, without resorting to crazy and rare motherboards with 4 PCI-e 16x slots.

Each GPU on the 7950 GX2 is very powerful, but not the king of the Nvidia hill. That title goes to the 7900 GTX, clocking in at 600MHz. Each 7950 GX2 GPU is clocked at 500MHz, but other than the slower core, the two halves of the 7950 have a lot in common with the 7900 GTX. They each have 512 MB of memory, 8 vertex shaders and 24 vertex shaders.

The 7950 GX2 doesn’t get the luxury of an elaborate cooling system as the second PCB takes up the space that a dual slot heatsink design would usually occupy. After considering the size of the heatsink on the beastly 7900 GTX, and the close proximity of the GPUs in the 7950 GX2, the 100MHz speed decrease starts to makes sense. This reduced clock speed may reduce heat output, but the benchmarks show that a single 7950 GX2 can’t outperform two 7900 GTX cards working in SLI.

As we all know, hardware is nothing without the software to drive it properly. It’s not surprising that a single 7950 GX2 doesn’t outperform a 7900 GTX SLI rig due to hardware differences but it is a little disappointing that a 7950 GX2 SLI rig -- otherwise known as quad SLI -- doesn’t yet have the support to be the performance king.

When we fired up F.E.A.R. we got some stellar results from the quad SLI setup, a jump from 63 to 104 fps, proving the quad SLI hardware has potential. Now we are just awaiting games that will support it. Nvidia will undoubtedly try to drive quad SLI into developer studios and homes as hard as it possibly can.

It’s important to bear in mind that the 7950 GX2 costs less than Nvidia’s flagship single GPU card, the 7900 GTX, and if SLI is enabled, a single 7950 GX2 will outperform a single 7900GTX. If the games you play support SLI at the moment and you want an upgrade path, the 7950 GX2 walks the line between immediate performance and longevity very well. The gamble that faces us all here is future support from developers for quad SLI and how other single GPU setups evolve.

The thing to appreciate in this installment of the graphics card arms race is that cutting edge performance is now more than ever being dictated by developer support. SLI graphics cards may now have a total of 2GB of RAM, but you’ll have to play the waiting game before you can use that fearsome silicon at its full potential. If quad takes off and you’ve already got a 7950 GX2 you can grab another one -- which by then will cost a lot less -- instead of adding another superseded graphics card to your pile of obsolete hardware. But by all means grab two now if you’re loaded and can’t help yourself.

The results. Click to enlarge.