Review: MSI NX7950GX2 dual-core graphics card

The latest incarnation of the Holy Grail to appear has nothing to do with a certain Italian artist but everything to do with having a four graphic card setup in your PC; namely quad-SLI.

Nvidia's first attempt was deemed too complicated to be set up by enthusiasts and was only available through system builders, but their latest card, the Geforce 7950GX2, is a long step down the road to DIY Quad SLI.

Nvidia is currently working on a driver package that will achieve this smoothly and easily, but will no doubt carry a sky-high price tag.

The 7950GX2 uses two PCBs joined by a single long riser to achieve an SLI setup. It sits in a single PCI Express slot using a standard 6pin power connection.

Each card has a one Geforce 7900GTX core but, due to the problem of heat dissipation, these are clocked slower than a standard single 7900GTX.

The cores run at 500MHz, which is some 200MHz slower than the standard reference design.

The 1GB of GDDR3 (512MB per card) has been clocked at 600MHz (1,2GHz effective); a standard 7900GTX has memory clocked at 800MHz (1.6GHz effective).

There have been some compatibility issues with the card, but Nvidia has a list of compatible motherboards on its website.

The first of the new cards we have seen comes from MSI.

The NX7950GX2 uses the reference design, albeit with MSI logos on the heatsink, with standard core and memory clock speeds, but MSI have included their DOT (Dynamic Overclocking Technology) Express, which should give you another 10 per cent or so boost on top of the standard clock speeds.

As you can see by its performance results, the NX7950GX2 tops our table of graphics cards with a 3Dmark05 score of 12,226.

As soon as we get some other 7950GX2 cards in, we'll compare their results to the ones achieved by this MSI card.

View full performance results for MSI NX7950GX2 dual-core graphics card
Compared to all graphics cards