14 DAY TRIAL // For those of you who have read about the passive version of XFX's 7950 GT, this is not a rerun nor is it an update to the original material. Actually, shortly after they released 7950 GT passive, the guys at XFX received such a good feedback from the resellers that they decided to produce another version of the same card.
This time it is the fully charged 512MB card that comes to play. Needless to say that it has everything you want from a card, starting with Dual-DVI with HDCP support and hardware decoding for WMV9-HD and H.264. Ok, that may actually bother you so let's get to the performance land.
The only think that comes to my mind is "fantastic". Can you believe that the actual clocks on this completely passive solution from XFX are 570MHz for the GPU and 1460 MHz for the memory? The passive heatpipe cooling solution is at its best here since it can keep the card running cool even when overclocked beyond the specs. Talking about overclocking, this product gets even more successful with several confirmation from owners that the card can run a 650/1600 GPU/memory setup artifact free. In this case however, XFX advices the overclockers to use additional active cooling that have to be attached to the heatsink.
The results in games and 3DMark benchmarks prove what was already obvious: in the $330-$360 price range this card is a winner scoring 20,000 points on 3DMark 03, 10800 points in 05 and more than 5400 points in 06. Overclock it and you'll get almost 6,000 3DMarks in 2006 version. Games like Fear and Quake 4 remain playable even at 2048x1536 resolutions with AA and AF enabled at the maximum supported values.
With a price of $350 (more or less, depending on the retailer) the XFX 7950 GT 512MB version video card is a complete winner in the G71 area. It's a new successful product for XFX but at the same time it proves that G7x series has reached a dead end, as this card is one of the fastest single solutions based on the 7x series. G80 is here and no one can deny that.