Thoughts
Think seriously about what's been presented to you in this article thus far, concerning GeForce 7950 GX2, and you should (if I can do my job properly) come to a conclusion like this: NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 is probably the most caveat-laden graphics purchase yet released.The conditions that have to be satisfied before it makes sense to get one are pretty much as follows:
- Are you willing to live with less-than-absolute best image quality from the high-end generation right now?
- Are you sure the games you play all have SLI support, or you're at least happy to wait for support to come in a future driver?
- Do you have a PC platform that supports it properly, which is realistically just nForce SLI of some flavour?
- Do you have a very well ventilated PC chassis, able to assist in the significant cooling challenges it presents?
- Do you own a high resolution PC display, since it's built for at least 1600x1200 in current supported games?
- If you run dual displays, are you happy for one to go blank when in multi-GPU mode?
Now given yes to all of the above, are you then willing to spend £450 on a single graphics board? You are? Brilliant, they're available today, you'll enjoy the framerates and overall IQ, happy shopping!
Otherwise, well, you get the idea. Yes, it's quick when games support it, but not all do. And to actually keep it running nice and stable is a considerated exercise in component and chassis choices that you really shouldn't have to make (unless you're a 'traditional' multi-GPU user of course, where your core logic choice and graphics vendor are fixed).
If the rumoured £450 is right, including VAT, it's a good bit cheaper than the discrete multi-GPU setups on test, for a healthy slice of the performance, but it's very expensive for a single board and the caveats to run it make it almost impossible to sanely recommend. You'll have to do that bit of decision making yourself.
Going back to the first-page musings on D3D9 monsters: yes, it absolutely is one when the scenario is setup for it to go hell for leather and really push some pixels. But then it's also monsterous in other ways, not all of them good.
