Enthusiasts are actually a very simple folk. Sure, the stereotype is probably extravagant hardware, fancy cooling, insane modifications, but the fact of the matter is, the ultimate goal is simply more speed. While there are many classes of enthusiasts, I cannot think of one who's goal is to create a slow system.

Nothing defines a gaming enthusiast more than their video card hardware. Sure, lots of memory and a fast processor are also key, but the video card, or cards, is what allows a person to play at high resolutions. Typically, the easiest route to high resolution gaming was to buy an expensive top-of-the-line video card, but over the past couple years, we've seen multiple video cards, be it SLI or CrossFire setups, change the way in how we configure our systems. No longer do you need to absolutely buy the most expensive hardware you can. Now, you get away with pairing up some reasonably priced cards and get near the performance of a top end product, or even better.

The MSI NX7950GX2-T2D1GE we'll be looking at today falls somewhere in between. What you get here is essentially two upper ranged GPUs paired up together in one card. Unlike SLI, provided you have a supported motherboard, you do not need a chipset from NVIDIA for this card to work. Imagine, multi-GPU action from NVIDIA on a CrossFire board. Bizarro world.

MSI NX7950GX2-T2D1GE

MSI's NX7950GX2-T2D1GE arrived in an understated white coloured box with a plastic carry handle coming from the inside packaging box. Inside, the video card was encased in white packing foam resting in a clear plastic shell. All of the accessories are placed in their own "containers" as well.

The card itself is very similar physically to NVIDIA's reference sample with MSI's own custom artwork on the cooler. The 7950GX2 is not as simple as slapping two video cards together and calling it a day. That much is obvious since only one PCI-Express connection is needed on the motherboard.

The NX7950GX2 uses two GPUs connected to their own circuit boards. There's no SLI connector as we're used to seeing on vanilla SLI setups, but both boards are connected via a PCI-Express bus built into the card. What this does is it adds more PCI-Express lanes which in turn expands the number of motherboards it can work with. Like we stated earlier, you do not need a motherboard with a chipset from NVIDIA, but not every motherboard will automatically work. NVIDIA does have a growing list here, so it would be a good idea to take a look before making the plunge. We can confirm quickly that the ASUS A8N32-SLI, ASUS P5N32-SLI, ASUS P5WD2 and MSI K9N-SLI all work fine with the video card. One nice thing about the NVIDIA site is you can grab the BIOS you need directly from there, so think of it as a one stop shop for support info and BIOS downloads.

Each GPU is built on the 90nm fab process and consists of 278 million transistors. Each core is clocked at 500MHz, and has 8 vertex shaders and 24 pixel shaders. Now, since this card has two GPUs, the transistor count is actually 556 million, with 16 vertex shaders and 48 pixel shaders. The MSI NX7950GX2 is armed with 1GB of Samsung GDDR3 memory (Model #K4J52324QC) clocked at 600MHz (1.2GHz effective). Like the single GPU versions of the 7900GT/GTX, the memory interface is 256-bit, but like everything else on the 7950GX2, this is doubled to 512-bit. If you were to think of one of the circuit boards as being a video card, the specs fall between the 7900GTX and 7900GT in terms of speed.

However, despite the marketing, you have to be careful about how those numbers are interpreted. The card for example does not exactly have 48 exclusive pixel shaders. Each GPU can only address 24, and cooperate in a way similar to SLI. Another example is the memory where the 7950GX2 does not have a 1GB of memory for the framebuffer, but only 512MB per GPU. Furthermore, the 512MB can only be accessed via a 256-bit interface. There's nothing wrong with the numbers, they are accurate, but they have to be interpreted properly. That said, for a single PCI-Express slot card, the specs are pretty impressive. The MSI NX7950GX2 is a G71 GPU like the other 7900s, hence the identical features.

You'll notice each card has its own individual cooler, which is required even though NVIDIA has made a lot of progress with power and heat management with their newest hardware. The NX7950GX2 will require two slots on the motherboard, though it only physically interfaces with one. That said, the MSI 7950GX2 is not as loud as one may expect considering we have two fans here. In fact, compared to the ATI X1900XTX, the MSI 7950GX2 is noticeably quieter, even under load.

The card does require a PCI-Express power source, but unlike a high-end SLI setup, you only need one instead of two. NVIDIA does recommend a 400W PSU, and as long as you stick with a SLI certified PSU, we think you should be ok.

Other than the card, MSI tosses in the required cables, as well as two DVI-to-VGA adapters. For HTPC fans, there are cables included for that as the card supports VIVO. There are a few CDs containing drivers and software as well as the game King Kong.

For your input and output options, there is a VIVO connection, and two DVI connections for dual screen support. However, to use two screens, you will have to configure the card via software to Multi-display mode. Though you will get images on both screens, the card will not be in "Multi-GPU" mode, which is essentially the SLI on one card solution. When you switch to Multi-GPU mode, the MSI NX7950GX2 will use both GPUs in tandem, but you lose the use of dual monitors.

On the topic of monitors, the MSI NX7950GX2's DVI ports are dual-linked and support resolutions of 2560x1600 f you're lucky enough to have an Extreme High Definition (XHD) digital display. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray media is also supported via NVIDIA's PureVideo HD technology. High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) is supported by the hardware, allowing the playback of the aforementioned discs.

Test Setup

Pentium 840 Extreme Edition
ASUS P5N32-SLI
2x512MB Corsair XMS2 8500
Maxtor 120GB Diamondmax 7200RPM

We'll be pitting the NX7950GX2-T2D1GE directly against the ASUS X1900XTX as well as comparing the performance of the NX7950GX2 to two 7900GT cards in SLI mode. All of the video cards will be tested at default clock speeds with the latest drivers available at the time of testing.

The games to be used for benchmarking are as follows:

Battlefield 2

Half-Life 2 Episode 1

Madden 2006

Quake 4

Tomb Raider Legend

For the tests, we stuck with the one resolution of 1600x1200. The driver settings were manually configured for AntiAliasing and Anisotropic Filtering enabled (4xAA and 16xAF respectively), and set to "Quality" via the video driver's control panel. All games were set to their highest allowable game settings and patched to the latest versions (as of September 12, 2006). FRAPS was used to capture the scores illustrated in the review.

Battlefield 2

	Min	Max	Ave
MSI NX7950GX2	41	82	62.6
ASUS X1900XTX	22	83	61.32

The MSI NX7950GX2 and ASUS X1900XTX provided a similar experience in Battlefield 2. We should point out that load times are brutal with 1GB of memory, so for those of you wondering why the game stutters a lot when a map loads, well, it isn't always the video card. Overall, we were unable to tall which card "felt smoother" despite the high quality settings.

Image Quality

Those of you who play the game (with good hardware I might add) know that BF2 has near photo realistic models and environments. Fire and gun effects are fantastic and the MSI NX7950GX2 allows for high quality images while keeping things playable. I did find the AntiAliasing cleaner on the 7950GX2 than it is on the X1900XTX, and the colours were a bit smoother as well.

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