We first tested the thermal regime of Chaintech 7950GT APOGEE, and this is what we got in the end.
As you can see, the Zalman cooler does a fantastic job of cooling the video processor, and its temperature never exceeds 65°C. Of course, we tried to overclock the card even further, and this is what we got in the end. Despite that the temperature of the chip did not exceed 66°, we failed to attain a stable operation at neither 690 MHz nor 675 MHz. That is, the video card did work, but because of the "freezes" the final result proved to be worse than that in the nominal mode. So we decided to stop at 650 MHz for the GPU. At this frequency, there were no freezes, and the results went up substantially. We also tried overclocking the video memory, but it failed to reach 1600 MHz - the system hung. So we decided to stop at the nominal frequency.
We performed a monitoring of the GPU temperature for MSI 7950GT Zero Edition as well.
Frankly, the results were really fantastic. At the nominal frequencies, the GPU temperature under load was almost as high as 100°. The video card was running stably, but such a high temperature causes some anxiety. We ran the tests on a open test-bench, but the CPU cooler was blowing air towards the connectors of the rear panel of the motherboard but not towards the video card. We did not use additional fans. Perhaps that was the cause of such heating. So when buying a MSI 7950GT Zero Edition we strongly recommend that you fit fans on the rear panel of the CPU unit. At that same, this recommendation applies to all cases of using video cards equipped with passive cooling.
Nevertheless, we did try overclocking the video card by MSI. The results are the following – 625/1550 MHz. Interestingly, when cooling the radiator of the video card with an additional fan we were able to overclock the GPU again to the same 650 MHz. To all appearances, it's not the temperature that is an obstacle to further overclocking. Perhaps with opening the volt mode the 7950GT video cards will get a "second wind", but that is a different story.
Interestingly, the 7950GT overclocked to 650/1550 MHz very much resembles the formerly top-end 7900GTX video card whose default frequencies are 650/1600 MHz. Since the frequencies of video cards are close and the pipeline formula is the same, we can expect their performance to be on the same level. We will now verify now whether it is true or not.
We'll be comparing both the novelties based on 7950GT versus the "good old" 7900GT/GTX.
Test setup
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Bus
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PCI-Express
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CPU
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MB
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Memory
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OS
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WinXP + SP2 + DirectX 9.0c
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PSU
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Thermaltake ToughPower 750 W
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For tests, we used NVIDIA ForceWare 92.91 drivers.
3DMark
Half-Life 2
DOOM 3
F.E.A.R.
Final Words
As you can see from the diagrams, at performance the new GeForce 7950GT chip finds itself almost in the middle between 7900GT and 7900GTX, and if there is good cooling it is even able catching up with the latter. As regards the video cards reviewed today, the Chaintech product is somehow more preferable for games since it offers a quiet cooler and is already factory-overclocked. The MSI video card appears to be a good candidate for a media center since it offers support for the HDCP and VIVO. Needless to say, we should not forget about the good cooling of the interior of such a media center. The recommended price for these 7950GT video cards is $300-$350.
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