XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme

Underneath the XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme's large passive cooler, lies a dark colored PCB, tricked out with neon-green accents and connectors.

Although it may be a different color, the PCB itself doesn't differ much from the GeForce 7900 GT, or the 7900 GS for that matter, but it is a newer revision.  Our reference GeForce 7900 GT's PCB is labeled as version "A00", while the 7950 GT pictured here is marked as version "A01B".  A quick visual comparison between the two didn't reveal any major differences other than a few different coils and the inclusion on an HDCP crypto-ROM.

Of course, the XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme is SLI-Ready, as is evident by its SLI connector at the top edge of the PCB.  The far end of the board houses a PCI Express 6-Pin power receptacle, and the mounting plate on the other side is home to a pair of dual-link DVI outputs and an HDTV/S-Video output.

The XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme's most intriguing feature has got to be its cooler.  XFX has outfitted this card with a low-profile passive cooler. That's right - passive, as in no noise.  A large, aluminum heatsink is mounted to the GPU and 512MB of memory on the front side of the PCB, and two heat-pipes connect the front heatsink to an array of thin aluminum cooling fins on the back. Most other GeForce 7950 GT cards are likely to be equipped with single-slot active coolers, similar to the one used on the 7900 GT.

The GeForce 7950 GT has essentially the same features as the more powerful GeForce 7900 GTX, but with lower clock speeds.  Both cards feature 24 pixel pipes, 16 ROPs, and 8 vertex shaders.  NVIDIA's reference specifications call for a 550MHz GPU clock with 1.4GHz (700MHz DDR) memory.  The XFX card we're looking at here is clocked a bit higher though, at 570MHz / 1.46GHz.  Don't fret though, we've down-clocked it to NVIDIA's specifications as well to give you all an idea as to how reference cards or other "stock" offerings will perform.