XFX 7950GT Extreme

A passively cooled performance graphics card? That'll silence my PC! I can't lose! Oh, wait a minute...

XFX is never content to deliver a vanilla card, something we’re thankful for, as it keeps things interesting. This beastie is meant to be a little faster than the older 7900GT, and packs in 512MB of RAM to push the point home.

Of course as an XFX there’s a point of difference. For a start, a 20MHz core and 60MHz memory increase on default speeds has been happily packaged in. In reality this is dick-all (equating to about an almighty 3fps increase), but more performance, especially extra performance that is under warranty, is always welcome.

Secondly, the bugger is silent thanks to a great wad of heatsink thumped onto the top, fed voluminous calories of heat through a pair of meaty pipes. Quite a lot of heat too – even at idle you really don’t want to touch the thing as it gets scaldingly hot. Fortunately it’s well within tolerances as evidenced by the complete lack of graphic anomalies or artefacts during our benchtesting, proving that XFX knows its engineering stuff.

Using the Forceware 91.47 drivers at 1280x1024, 3DMark06 yielded 1715 for the SM2.0 test, 2008 for the SM3.0 test, 80.6fps for Quake 4 and 94.07fps for Half-Life 2. Edging up the res to 1600x1200 gave 1424, 1623, 64.3fps and 78.96fps respectively. Quite tasty.

The thing is though, the X1900XT 256MB edition still beats it, is cheaper (even when you factor in the XFX’s street price) and this particular card is overclocked. Heck, with a bit of scrounging you could even get your hands on a fully fledged 7900GTX or X1900XT for not much more, bringing the existence of this card into question once again.

There’s an argument for the default 7950s as they compete rather well with the X1950 Pros, but we just can’t see why you’d opt for this card with better options available to you.