News NVIDIA launches 7950 GX2

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/06/05/NVIDIA_launches_7950_GX2/

 

still don't see how they consider this single card

 

Yeah a single card ushually invovles one PCB, not two linked. It's two 7900's in sli but one doesn't have PCI-e connector. seems like a "We can't be arsed/can't sort out our archy for a better GPU so we'll just slap another GPU on to a seperate board and call in a single card" AMD and nVidia need to stop this...

-Fr4nk

 

You mean like 3DFX did with the Voodoo series?

Oh, except they kept it on a single card, and just made the card a lot bigger.

After all, the Voodoo1 had 1 GPU. The Voodoo2 had 2. The Voodoo3 had 1 (Redesigned) GPU, the Voodoo 4/5 had 2 (Or 4 in the case of the canned Voodoo 5 6000)

Would you rather they shrunk die size and put the two GPUs on a single core (Dual Core GPUs?)

 

Dual core GPU, HMMMM.... nice idea , it dosn't look bad, allthough I also thought that there are two GPUs on a single PCB, well I guess I was wrong.

 

So basically, it's SLi, but not quite. Price tag looks interesting though. I wonder whether it will perform as well as an SLi rig. If it does, I bet many people will be feeling pretty silly.

-ed out

 

its not really a single card, as the "card" is the PCB, so its actually 2 PCB's, Or "cards"
Dual core GPU, atleast that requires some skill (if done right) as you can link the GPU's much more efficiently

 

Nice price - £430 isn't a long way beyond what you'd pay for a single X1900XTX or 7900GTX - can't wait to see some performance numbers, if only for the drool factor. These bad boys, like any high end gfx card, are waaaaaaaaaaaaaay beyond my price tag!

 

@mclean007: We can always dream.

-ed out

 

Perhaps they mean single card by how it takes up the same amount of room as only one card. Like for Shuttle users, this may be a blessing.

 

this is dumb...i was hoping something on the lines of 2 gpus on one pcb.......but i will wait to see if it compensates to have 2 realy power hungry gpus glued together, the thing is what will be the temp on these things and there will not be any chance to WC these things.

 

on top of that, this card uses 10% less power (and likely produces at least 10% less heat) than the ATI x1900 XTX (237Watts for NVidia 7950 GX2 versus 264W for ATI's beast).

other folks can say 2pcb's = 2 cards, but when it takes up the same amount of space in a computer (1 physical slot, two external like is very common for "single" high end graphics cards), is near the same price (nowhere near double the price of a single card), and uses less power, where is the problem? why argue semantics when the end result for the user is identical to, if not better than, a "true" single card?

 

ATI'c card takes that much power, are all of them the same kind of rating though (max or average) like when you compare AMD to intel
Cant believe 2 nvidia chips use less power then 1 ati chip ...

 

Is it just me or does that look like a SLI connector there on the card? Quad GPUs for the consumer market?

 

i dont see why they wouldnt put it on, quad GPU isnt amazingly special, the whole idea of a card like this is for quad GPU as far as i know
What i dont get, there seems to only be 1 SLI connector on the card, shouldnt there be 2 ?

 

Right you are EQC. But the only thing is that we're not really used to see a dual-gpu solution with 2 pcb-s. Hopefully it will live up to the expectations. When quad-sli came out with its first model, I thought my eyes are going crazy and playing tricks on me...well, the same thing happened when I saw the performance graphs. At first I doubted that nVidia would dare make such a config that they knew all to well that it won't work properly not to mention the lack of drivers for it. Another thing, I don't really know why they made the quad-sli so early after the outcoming of the 7900 series. It just dosn't seem justified(to me).
I hope that this dual-gpu solution is good, and it might as well be if be, for as I see Leadtek, ASUS and many more have allready integrated this tech.

 

heh, remember that these are nvidia mobile chips, not desktop. which would be the reason they run cooler/and with less power.

 

Well would you consider the voodoo 5 5000 a single card or 2 because that has 2 gpus on board, abit like this does. Except that there's too much circuitry to fit on one board. Or what if they used both sides of the board would that still be one card? For me if it fits into one pci-e slot then its a single card.

I think its kinda like HT in reverse, instead of having one processor acting as two. They've got two gpus to act like one, which could also explain why there plugging this as a single card.

 

They allready use both sides of the board, have you not looked on the back of it, anyway, it would be so much weight on the connector if you had 2 chips, as you then need 2HSF's on it, and all that
With this GX2 board some of the weight is supported by the expansion slot screw, so that helps resolve that issue

 

The voodoo 5 5500 was a great card in its day, I had one for a while and it swallowed up anything I could throw at it for a good while, plus the whole 'I've got 2 processors on my card AND it needs extra power to run' was great fun.

As far as this car goes, aside from it being out of my reach on price yet again, I couldn't care less whether it is 2 cards together or 1 card, as long as it kicks out some price-matching performance I say bring it on.