Thoughts
It's easy to be positive about the GeForce 7950 GT, since in reference configuration at 550/700 with 512MiB of on-board memory it's able to outrun 7900 GT by ~15% or so for pretty much the same money. If it comes in at the promised price point, NVIDIA have a nice product on their hands, and we see no reason why it won't do just that given a quick squint at Newegg and Scan over here in the UK.The reference board's form factor and cooling solution means it's slim and acceptably quiet, and we measured it to be fairly frugal in terms of power consumption too. The Infineon DRAMs didn't want to overclock much on our reference sample, stopping short of 800MHz when we tried, but core clock was able to be raised to just shy of the 7900 GTX's 650MHz. Even if you don't fancy overclocking any 7950 GT you buy, performance will still be good for the outlay.
The GeForce 7900 GT replacement therefore impresses as 7900 GS did, NVIDIA offering up higher levels of price/performance at the upper end of their mid-range lineup. Depending on where you shop, Radeon X1900 XT (with 512MiB) will likely tempt you for pretty much the same money (at the time of writing), but 7950 GT makes a good case for itself in areas of power consumption and noise and its display output ability, as well as in traditional frames per second.
The ultimate image quality argument is hopefully well understood by now, saving us from repeating ourselves there, so if NVIDIA is where you want to lay your ~£210/$300 then 7950 GT is what you should choose. We've got a few retail examples in Labs for testing, so look out for reviews of on-sale examples soon.
