Gadgetory

today we are taking apart at PAX West the 7950 GX - there's a dual GPU card I asked EVGA to bring us something cool to work with this is what they came up with so we should already have coverage up of the DG 77 case and that's actually new this however is not it's from 2006 it's a dual GPU card but unlike the dual GPU cards that most are used to from you at recent years this one has two PCBs on each of which is a separate set of memory separate vrm and a separate GPU so that's what we're going to be doing today we are tearing down the 7950 GX 2 dual GPU card from 2006 to see how it looks inside before getting to that this coverage is brought to you by a thermal take and their new core p3 chassis it's an open-air chassis that can double as a test bench or it can be wall mounted and you can learn more at the link of the description below so this card is a like I said it's got two GPUs on it in between there's actually an SLI bridge and we talked about this on EVGA stream so if you already saw their stream then you know most of this stuff but I'm gonna redo it all here for you so in between is the bridge and there's a bridge chip in there which this card is before my time as reviewers so I am not too familiar with its specs or performance at the time we can take it apart that's not outside of my abilities so we'll take this off it's got a couple of basically just these black sets of screws on either side to hold it all together and then on the opposite back of the PCB is the chrome door just normal screw steel screws that hold the cooler on so the cooler has got two small blower fans I'm not sure what the exact sizes they look kind of like 40s maybe 60s but I think they are closer to 40 I'm gonna have to get in here okay there we go that's the first piece free now there is a couple more of these they're held on here and here and also it's a 6-pin connector single one dual GPU it supports sli so you actually works a slide there's that sly finger right there so you do SLI with this which means you can do four-way SLI and it's not new to do for we SLI with two cards but this is two cards with four PCBs in that instance so that's kind of interesting in terms of the rest we have I think it's a 1 gigabyte memory capacity so I think we're at I think remember how many memory modules it was we'll see once we get in there but I think this was the era of gddr3 this is well before any HBM discussion even came up in the public especially 2006 era product it did not live very long that's got killed by another dual GPU card that I think came out with the 8000 series and effectively put the nail on the coffin for this one now this is despite being branded as EVGA it is a reference design from Nvidia so this is how they shipped for basically all of them and EVGA just happened to still have one in their warehouse they've a lot of actually a lot a hole to cool stuff there but if we take this last couple pegs I will be able to see the card okay looking good I think it just separates now so you can see the sli bridge in there we're just gonna pull and it should separate there you go there's the SLI bridge component there's a bridge chip underneath I don't know if it's under each of them or just under one we'll look though and also just from a TDP perspective I think this was a 146 what I want to say part so if you put that into perspective day this is what was it like 76 gigabytes of memory bandwidth per second on this card you have modern cards doing well over 300 in some cases and and then for I this was before single CUDA cores were really a thing they were doing vertex and I think pixel pipelines was the other one vertex and pixel pipelines vertex shaders that is so older Arab but the point is that 146 was you look at the performance then what that gave you a versus the frogs now we're like what is it a 10 60 maybe is around that area a 480 is not too distant so you consider the technology today and when this came out it's pretty big job especially because this video card I believe was six hundred and fifty dollars when it launched video cards effectively so 615 you can still get them for around 60 bucks on the eBay but yeah there's the GPU we already rubbed that there won't pay stop earlier and the die actually says the dye cover says G 71 I don't remember which architecture this is you could I'll look it up and maybe leave a comment below but G 71 was the GPU very small GPU comparatively and so you don't need a huge cooling solution and also I think the 146 Watts may have been for the entire card not for just one so that's the case you're looking at saudi watts per GPU if that's the case I'd have to look it up and we're at a trade show so small cold plate here aluminum zinc aluminum separate bridges to connect through the thermal pad and to the B Ram modules so there are eight of these per card and it's a one gigabyte total capacity on the whole card so that's 512 and the other ones gonna have 512 as well and then for the power components it's a delta inductor setup and then front side there's the bridge chip there's a sli bridge you can actually pull that out if you wanna have you want to do a mod on this like i mean if i were reviewing this today if it were a new card i'd love to pull it apart put a different sli connector in there like a ribbon cable and then you just put a big cooler on each one and see what I can do for overclocking and this card this is the same so it's it's identical under there there's no point taking it apart the cooler is all the same you can see it's a pretty pedestrian cooler by today's standards the aluminum fins in there are not that dense there's not a lot of mass but I guess it worked for the time I'm not really sure we didn't review on there's a tiny fan though and that's it that's the 7950 gx2 as always if you like this content you can go to patreon.com/scishow cameras next ourselves that directly or subscribe for more check out the channel for other coverage like the dg7 overview at the show and we'll see you all next time