XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, September 14, 2006, 08:00 AM EDT

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Our Summary and Conclusion

Performance Summary: In general the XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme was slightly faster than a reference GeForce 7950 GT, thanks to its marginally higher GPU and memory clock speeds. In terms of the GeForce 7950 GT's performance versus the other members of the GeForce 7 family and ATI's current Radeon X1900s, the results are mixed. Considering its specifications, the new 7950 GT falls in line where you'd expect it to, behind the more expensive GeForce 7900 GTX and ahead of the 7900 GT. In comparison to the Radeons, the GeForce 7950 GT competed well against the similarly priced 256MB Radeon X1900 XT, losing in the majority of our benchmarks by only a small margin.

With the new GeForce 7950 GT, NVIDIA has successfully fleshed out their GeForce 7 series line-up with strong products at virtually every single price point, from the sub-$100 7300 to the flagship 7950 GX2. While its performance wasn't dominant in comparison to the similarly priced Radeon X1900 XT, the GeForce 7950 GT still has its advantages. For one, we doubt you're ever going to find a passively cooled X1900 card anytime soon, and there is no completely practical multi-GPU option for the 256MB Radeon X1900 XT. Users looking to run dual-256MB X1900 XTs can do so in a dongle-less mode and lose the super-AA performance advantages offered by ATI's compositing engine, or run the card alongside a 512MB CrossFire Edition X1900 XTX and end up with half of the master card's frame buffer disabled. Either option isn't ideal. A pair of passively cooled 7950 GTs running in SLI mode however, would scale very well and they wouldn't generate even the slightest bit of noise. That's a compelling configuration option in our book, even if XFX ends up being the only company with a passively cooled offering. We were relatively impressed by the GeForce 7950 GT, especially in the configuration presented to us by XFX. We're giving the XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme a solid 8.5 on the Heat Meter.