XFX 7950GX2 570M XXX Edition Video Card

XFX 7950GX2 XXX Edition

The XFX 7950GX2 XXX is a beast of a card and follows the reference design very closely. The only noticeable differences are the fan stickers, however it?s a XXX for a reason and that is the clock speeds. The XFX GX2 speeds up the GPU core to 570MHz and the memory to 800MHz. That?s a 70MHz increase on the core and 200MHz memory and goes a long way to making up the difference between itself and the 7900 GTX.

The heatsink and fan are somewhat similar to the 7900GT in sound output but XFX has added a decent amount of throttling to save your ears while not in 3D. Looking at the top of the second card in the above picture you can see a single SLI connection. This is for pairing up a set of these in Quad SLI mode. Quad SLI is not yet supported by NVIDIA or XFX, but NVIDIA has informed us that if our readers are willing to buy two of these cards that they will start a beta testing team to work out the bugs. (So, If you want Quad SLI and are willing to fight driver bugs with NVIDIA they will support you. Please e-mail Nathan Kirsch on our contact page for more information if you are interested.)

Out back we see that NVIDIA only includes a pair of Dual-Link DVI connectors. I don?t see many enthusiasts using 4 screens so this shouldn?t be an issue. While testing the multiple output of the card it was found that they are in fact driving each port from its own GPU. As always, only a single output can be displayed while in multi-GPU mode.

It?s interesting to note that there is only a single power connector required for this pair of cards. For the 7950GX2 NVIDIA recommends a 400W power supply with 27A on the 12v rail. The the 7950GX2 requires less power than a pair of 7800GTX 512MB video cards — Now that is interesting!

In the photo above you can see the on-board two way communications system of the 7950GX2. This PCB can be removed and doesn’t seem to have a certain direction to be installed. As you can tell we also removed the heat sink off the secondary card (the back one) to see what was under the heat spreader.

Here is a closer look at the core on our XFX GeForce 7950GX2 video card. The GPU ID string is G71-D-H-N-A2, which means we have an A2 piece of silicon on our hands! The memory IC’s are Samsung GDDR3’s with the part number K4J523240Q-BC14, which are rated at 1.429ns or 700MHz performance. If you are interested in the memory IC’s check out Samsung’s GDDR3 site for more information here.

XFX is offering a total of 3 7950GX2 models

• PV-T71U-ZDL9 -The standard 7950GX2 at 500MHz GPU and 1.2GHz memory.
• PV-T71U-ZDF9 -The Extreme Edition at 520MHz GPU core and 1.3GHz memory.
• PV-T71U-ZDD9 -The XXX Edition at 570MHz GPU core and 1.55GHz memory.

Unfortunately we don?t have a 7900 GTX SLI set up to test against so we?ll be comparing it to CrossFire and 7900GT SLI, as well all of the high end single cards.