Introduction
The competition below the $300 price point has taken a noticeable turn in the past three weeks with both competing graphics companies making large strides towards better price/performance ratios. ATI recently slashed the entry price for an
X1900 XT to $279 and NVIDIA has moved the base fee for a 7900-based card to $199. Today, NVIDIA is fully replacing the 7900 GT at the $299 price point with the 7950 GT, with cards available from the major board makers including EVGA, BFG and XFX, who's particular card we have for our review. The 7950 GT was announced over a week ago with the
7900 GS, however the boards did not reach store shelves until today.
On the next page we will be taking a closer look at the XFX card itself, however we will be highlighting the differences between the 7900 GT and the 7950 GX2 first. While the '7950' tag could confuse this card for the dual-PCB GX2, NVIDIA are not concerned about supplementing that card at the top end, and are wisely targetting the performance segment. The carry over of the high end annotation will only be helpful in selling this card, which comes a step closer to 7900 GTX territory in terms of specification.
NVIDIA has bumped the stock clocks of the 7900 GT by 100 MHz to 550 MHz, bringing the 7950 GT within 100 MHz of the core speed of 7900 GTX cards. The memory clock rate of a stock 7950 GT is 1400 MHz, up from 1320 MHz on the 7900 GT, but still 200 MHz short of the 7900 GTX. The most notable addition perhaps however, is the doubling of the memory figure, which now sits at 512 MB. This boost makes clock rates and cooler outfitting the only difference between 7950 GT and 7900 GTX cards and makes this a very powerful sub $300 card indeed. One non-performance difference between the 7950 GT and 7900 GTX is NVIDIA's decision to include HDCP support on all 7950 cards. HDCP, while currently the love of every future-proofing enthusiast, is essentially an entirely negligible 'feature' at the moment seeing as copy protected disks will not be hitting store shelves until the latter portion of 2007 anyhow. Assuming the prices of HD-DVD and BluRay drives have fallen by significant amounts by that time (or you decide to splurge), and you own an HDCP supporting monitor and HDCP-required disks, then and only then does HDCP become a feature. If you know that that's you in a year and you don't plan on upgrading your graphics board until some point beyond that time, NVIDIA have done you a good service by including the required cypto-rom on all 7950 boards.
Aside from those changes, NVIDIA has added a variable-speed fan controller to all 7950 boards which should regulate the whining tendencies typical of a loaded 7900 GT. We're not sure however of the standard cooler's (which remains the same on most 7950 GT boards, an exception being our XFX board) ability to withstand the higher clocks of the 7950 GT. A number of 7900 GT owners have ran into problems with factory overclocked solutions because the cooler that shipped on those cards was not sufficient. We're hoping that we don't run into a similar situation this time around.
Speaking of heat and noise however, click on to the next page to find out what XFX has done with their overclocked 7950 GT cards - the answer may not be what one would assume as XFX has chosen to make this card really stand out.
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