Features of the XFX 7950 GX2 Quad SLI Graphics Cards
No Master Card Required
Unlike ATI's CrossFire neither Quad SLI nor normal SLI require a special master card to work. You simply get two Nvidia graphics cards that use the same GPU along with a SLI mainboard and compatible motherboard and you are ready to do SLI. Your graphics cards don't even need to have the same clock speeds as evidenced by this review. I am using an XFX 7950 GX2 XXX and an XFX 7950 GX2 Extreme edition for this review. The cards sport the same GPU, but different GPU and memory clock speeds. Moral of the story is so long as your GPUs are the same you can run SLI.
Specifications
I have reviewed the XFX 7950 GX2 XXX graphics card previously and you can see that full review here. The second graphics card in my Quad SLI rig is the XFX 7950 GX2 Extreme edition that is identical to the XXX version, save slight lower core clock speed of 520 MHz and memory speed of 1.3 GHz. I won't go over the other many features off the XFX 7950 GX2 here again, read the previous review for the gory details.
XFX 7950 GX2 Quad SLI in Use
Test System Specs
My test system for the Quad SLI review has the following specs:
- CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+
- Mainboard: Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe
- RAM: OCZ PC2 8000 4-4-4-8 2 x 1GB
- Graphics Cards: 1x XFX 7950 GX2 XXX; 1x XFX 7950 GX2 Extreme
- PSU: PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 1KW
- HDD: Seagate 750GB
- Sound Card: Creative X-Fi
- Display: Eizo CE240W 24" LCD
- Display Driver: ForceWare 91.45
Bench Marks
Since I have reviewed the XFX 7950 GX2 XXX graphics card individually before, this time around for the quad SLI review I will just talk about the Quad SLI tests. I chose to use my standard bench suite consisting of Fear, Quake 4 and 3DMark06.
Fear
The first test I ran was Fear. With the review of the ATI X1900 CrossFire rig fresh in my mind, I wanted to see how Nvidia's new beastie measured up to ATI's offering. I allowed Fear to choose the settings for the first run and ended up with the following settings:
- Single player physics: Med
- Multiplayer physics: Med
- Software sounds: Med
- Particle bouncing: Med
- Shell casings: On
- World detail: Max
- Corpse detail: Max
- Effects details: Max
- Model decals: Max
- Water resolution: Med
- Reflections & displays: Max
- Volumetric lights: On
- Volumetric light density: Med
- FSAA: Off
- Light detail: Max
- Enable shadows: On
- Soft shadow: Off
- Texture filter: AF 4x
- Texture resolution: Max
- Video resolution: Med
- Resolution: 1024 x 768
- Shader: Max
At these settings the Quad SLI beast laughed in the face of Fear proving the only thing to Fear is Quad SLI. The minimum frame rate at these settings was 45 FPS, average frame rate was 101 FPS and the maximum frame rate was 218 FPS. Never once did the frame rates dip below the magic 40 FPS number.
Naturally with Quad SLI being the best graphics platform around and Fear being one of the most taxing games around on hardware, I turned everything to the max and ran the test loop again at 1600 x 1200. XFX's 7950 GX2 Quad SLI rig kicked Fear squarely in the testes with a fully maxed out setting run again never once dipping below 40 FPS! That's right Fear with everything on ran on the Quad SLI rig with a minimum frame rate of 45 FPS, average frame rate of 88 frickin' FPS and a max frame rate of 192 FPS!
3DMark06
For you synthetic fans out there Quad SLI again handed ATI the shortest time for a 3DMark06 record in my lab, beating it soundly right after the X1900 Crossfire review. XFX's Quad SLI rig burned through 3DMark06 at default settings and scored 8448 3DMarks. The details broke out like this:
- Return to Proxycon: 32.301
- firefly forest: 33.222
- Deep Freeze: 41.018
- CPU1: 0.613
- CPU2: 0.960
To test the rig at my displays native resolution of 1920 x 1200 I ran 3DMark06 again at that resolution with all other settings the same. The final score was 7178 3DMarks!
Quake 4
The final benchmark that I ran on the XFX 7950 GX2 Quad SLI rig was Quake 4. I ran quake 4 at ultra quality with AA of 8x and AF of 4x, SMP enabled at a resolution of 1024 x 768 for the first test run. The average frame rate at these settings was 129.3 FPS. For the final Quake 4 test I ran the game at 1920 x 1200 with all other settings the same. The average frame rate was 41.1 FPS.
