Why buy 2x7900GTX when you can buy 1x7950 GX2

[W1nTry]

In a few words, it's: QUAD SLI minus the second card. Have a read:

Nvidia to flog GeForce 7950 GX2 as a single card

Six hundred bucks


By Fuad Abazovic: Thursday 18 May 2006, 11:39

NVIDIA PLANS to sell its upcoming, doubled-up, if shorter, Geforce 7950 GX2 cards as a single card. You will of course be able to buy two of them for use in Quad SLI, but a single card will work happily on its own. It should settle down at around the €/$600+ price and should be announced on the last day of May, the 31st, of course.
We think Nvidia can really give ATI a run for its money here, as it plans to position a two-chip single card against ATI's top-of-the-line Radeon X1900XTX. The Geforce 7950 GX2 card will roughly cost the same or it might end up little more expensive than ATI's but it will certainly outperform a single-chip Radeon X1900 XTX.

It won't be a cheap card to produce but it sure has all the chance of being the fastest one.

So, if you were thinking about buying two 7900 GTX cards, you might want to hold your breath for two more weeks and buy a two-chip, two-PCB 7950 GX2 for just a little bit more money. µ

[Beomagi]

it's clocked a lot slower

I'd rather just have the x1900xt or just one than the gx2 in quad
here's a techpowerup review that includes the x1900xt crossfire, a gx2 and 2 gx2's in quad sli
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/QuadSLI/9

admirable how well dual x1900xt's keep up with quad.

[Spazosaurus]

One important detail there that u seem to miss is the fact that they are all performing about the same at 10x7, which is clearly a case of the cpu bottlenecking the cards. When that is removed however, we see the sheep spearate from the goats.

[Beomagi]

and the other detail is the 2560x1600

[Crixx_Creww]

wdmc @ 2560x1600

[Spazosaurus]

That kind of resolution is for displays like apple's 30" cinema etc. But even self resolutions not so high but around 1920X1440 or 2048X1536, which can be pushed by som ordinary crt's the bottleneck caused by the cpu will still be gone, showing the difference between cross and sli.

[W1nTry]

1 more thing to consider is that the 7950 GX2 is going to be around 600USD so when you think about it, once it outperforms a single X1900XTX then for a little more money it's not a bad way to go... then there's that ridiculous resolution and quad SLI. Maybe with AM2 and Conroe we'll be eased up on the bottleneck and see QSLI gain. I hear ATI has a Q Xfire in the works, but we all know this is about bragging rights more than anything else.

[Beomagi]

It's not bottlenecking on cpu at those resolutions. am2 and conroe wont make or break quad sli, better drivers will. when you see the gx2 beating 2 gx2's that just says immature driver support.

[W1nTry]

It's not bottlenecking on cpu at those resolutions. am2 and conroe wont make or break quad sli, better drivers will. when you see the gx2 beating 2 gx2's that just says immature driver support.

Whilst I agree with the immature drivers statement, are you sure it's correct to say the CPU is not a bottleneck? most reviews i've seem they show better results with better CPUs eg. OCing a FX-60 with an SLI/Xfire rig gets even albeit a few fps more.

[Beomagi]

It's not bottlenecking on cpu at those resolutions. am2 and conroe wont make or break quad sli, better drivers will. when you see the gx2 beating 2 gx2's that just says immature driver support.

Whilst I agree with the immature drivers statement, are you sure it's correct to say the CPU is not a bottleneck? most reviews i've seem they show better results with better CPUs eg. OCing a FX-60 with an SLI/Xfire rig gets even albeit a few fps more.

this is true, though the curve hits a plateu fast depending on the game.

here's doom3 at 1280
http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html?modelx=33&model1=238&chart=70&model2=212
see how flat? that's a video card bottleneck. Not a cpu one. Yes it's the little faster. But you're hitting the limits of the video card. drop down to the 1024 bench and you'd see it sort as you'd naturally expect it - (green on top...) as the cpu now becomes a bigger factor relative to the video card.


now back to techpowerup - at 1024x768 - heck yeah the cpu should be the limiting factor as the cards would be spinning it's wheels. But at 2560x1600, those cards would be stressed to keep up.