Comparing GeForce Models: 7900 GX2 And 7950 GX2, Continued

The GeForce 7950 GX2 cards are only nine inches long and will fit standard cases and many SFF chassis. No longer will the DIY crowd need an especially large housing to fit such large cards.

With the GeForce 7950 GX2, Nvidia fixed some of the issues we saw in the GeForce 7900 GX2. The first of these is the positioning of the capacitors; they are no longer placed where SATA cables attached to the motherboard could damage them. Another correction is the use of only one 6-pin power connection. Nvidia claims that the maximum draw is 143 watts and this makes sense, as 75 watts of power can be supplied by the PCIe bus, while an additional 75 W comes from the 6-pin connection. The placement of the power connection is on the top PCB, which means that both can draw from their local power source.

The last of the visible changes is that there is only one set of SLI bridge connection pins. Although Nvidia claims there should be no difference in performance between the 7900 and 7950 versions, there should be. The theoretical bandwidth of only one SLI bridge when used with a second card should be higher on the 7900 GX2 model, as there are two SLI bridge connections. Only time will tell if this is the case, as we have yet to receive a driver that will allow us to run two GeForce 7950 GX2 cards in a Quad GPU setup.

Specifications

In the table below, you can see that the GeForce 7950GX2 represents almost a doubling of hardware. Nvidia keeps the core and memory running a bit slower than the GeForce 7900GTX due to heat issues.