A year or so back, if you wanted to have more than one CPU in your system, you had to go buy a separate CPU and make sure your motherboard had more than one CPU socket to get it installed and working. Dual core CPUs threw that twenty+ year old notion out the door. With the 7950GX2, nVidia is doing something similar today.

While the 7950 is technically a single card in the sense that it only requires one PCI-E slot to work, it is made up of two GPUs connected via a custom developed PCI Express switch by nVidia that directs the bidirectional PCI Express connection from the system to both GPUs. You don't need an SLI certified motherboard for it and it'll work with almost any modern chipset board supporting PCI-E.

Each of the two 90mm 196sq. mm cores has access to its own dedicated 512MB memory so while the total amount of RAM is 1GB, its not shared between the two GPUs. According to nVidia the 7950GX2 consumes a maximum of 143 watts which is much lower than an SLI or CrossFire solutions.

With us today, we have the 7950 provided to us by MSI. It comes packaged in a standard MSI graphics high-end graphics card packaging. Inside MSI bundles the full version of King Kong as well as all the cables you'd expect- such as power and Video cables. A couple of DVI-DSUB converters are also included.

The card itself is basically the same beast as the nVidia reference card. It's a two slot solution with two PCBs with a core of each one of them. An SLI connector is present on one of the PCBs for a QuadSLI setup, however, nVidia has yet to release drivers to take advantage of such a setup.

We used our standard testbed for testing this card out which is made up of an ASUS A8R32 (Crossfire x3200) motherboard, the Athlon64 4800+ CPU and 2x512MB Corsair DDR400 modules running at 2-2-2-5. Lets find out how well this card did compared to the ATI x1900XTX, the nVidia 7900GTX as well as some other higher-end cards.