XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme Video Card

XFX 7950 GT 570M Extreme

As mentioned in the review of the 7900 GS, I really like the all black PCB and brackets. It’s as sexy as a computer component can get without having a picture of Kristen Kruek on it. It quickly becomes obvious something is missing on this card and it is indeed the fan. This card is 100% passively cooled. Where the fan usually is we see a massive black heat spreader with the XFX logo on it and a set of aluminum heat pipes coming out of the top.

On the back side of the card we see that the heat pipes are inserted into aluminum fins to dissipate the heat. The other two pipes you see in the aluminum fins are attached to a bracket on the left side and are there to keep the whole thing stable and off the backside of the card. Let’s get under the heat sink and see where the heat is coming from.

Now that we’ve got the heat sink off we see that the core contacts the heat spreader by a copper plate. The heat is then spread to the heatpipes and the rest of the sink. The length of the board is identical to the 7900 GS and 7900 GT which are all shorter than the 7900 GTX. The 7950 GT does of course require the PCI-E power connector.

Here is a picture of the core, the numbers silk screened on the core are almost identical to those of our 7950GX2 which suggests that NVIDIA is again using some of the better binned power efficient cores similar to the mobile line here. The core is clocked at 570MHz on our XFX card.

The memory used on the 7950 GT is Infineon branded GDDR3 rated for 700MHz. XFX is already running over the spec rating for this memory by clocking them at 730MHz (1.43GHz effective).

2 Dual link DVI connectors are standard as they were on the 7900 GS and 7900 GT. This silent beauty from XFX will set you back $320.