Introduction

Ever since NVIDIA’s SLI technology made its retail debut in late 2004, graphics card manufacturers have been busy coming up with ways to push the technology even further. Gigabyte for instance famously kicked this off with their 3D1 graphics card back in late December 2004. The Gigabyte 3D1 fused two GeForce 6600 GT GPUs and 256MB of memory onto one board (128MB of GDDR3 memory per GPU), providing full GeForce 6600 GT SLI functionality from one package that comfortably fit into a single slot in your system. The card performed inline with what you’d expect from a pair of GeForce 6600 GT cards, with the added advantage of course that it all fit in a single-slot package, making it ideal for use in smaller cases.

Over time Gigabyte and motherboard manufacturers ASUS and MSI released follow-on single-PCB (printed circuit board) SLI combo cards based on more powerful GPUs like the GeForce 6800 GT and GeForce 7800 GT. These cards delivered even more performance for gamers, with the only caveat being that you couldn’t combine two of these specialized cards to deliver up to four times the performance of a single GeForce card.

That’s where NVIDIA’s Quad SLI technology comes in.

The GeForce 7950 GX2

Card is just 9 inches long

With Quad SLI, two GeForce GPUs and memory are combined on one board, only two of these cards can be combined together for a total of four GPUs in one Quad SLI system. We first took a look at Quad SLI a little over a month ago in our GeForce 7900 GX2 Quad SLI Performance Preview article and found that while the technology worked, it did have its fair share of issues. Stability wasn’t the greatest, we ran into numerous crashes, BSODs and other errors, while its performance wasn’t quite up to the level that was expected when the technology was first announced, even at ultra high-resolutions such as 2048x1536 and 2560x1600.

The GeForce 7950 GX2 sits with the GeForce 7900 GX2

GeForce 7950 GX2 and Radeon X1900 XTX

Since then NVIDIA’s been working furiously on improving their Quad SLI technology, it’s been discovered that a lot of the stability issues we were running into were caused by the motherboard’s BIOS, while newer drivers have improved NVIDIA’s performance. But NVIDIA didn’t stop there, with today’s release of the GeForce 7950 GX2, NVIDIA is also introducing newer Quad SLI hardware that resolves one of the chief criticisms levied at the original GeForce 7900 GX2 Quad SLI card: its immense size. One GeForce 7900 GX2 measures over one foot in length!

Today’s GeForce 7950 GX2 launch is a little different than the initial GeForce 7900 GX2 Quad SLI launch though in the sense that NVIDIA’s focusing on the 7950 GX2’s performance in a single-card SLI configuration, claiming that the GeForce 7950 GX2 is the “highest performing single graphics board on the market”. Quad SLI support for the GeForce 7950 GX2 isn’t supported by NVIDIA’s latest driver just yet. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new with the card.

The GeForce 7950 GX2 and 7900 GTX

GeForce 7900 GT sits with the GeForce 7950 GX2

The GeForce 7900 GTX (top), 7900 GX2, and 7950 GX2 (bottom)