We disassembled this video card to take a look. On Figure 5 you can see the two printed circuit boards used by this card. A small PCB that you can see on the lower board connects them. The switch chip is located on the lower card and the video card cooler refrigerates it.
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Figure 5: Video card disassembled.
We removed the lower card heatsink to take a look. It is far smaller than the heatsink used on GeForce 7900 GTX and different from the heatsink used on GeForce 7900 GT, which is all copper-made, while the heatsinks available on GeForce 7950 GX2 are aluminum-made with copper-made base. They refrigerate all memory chips (the heatsink used on GeForce 7900 GT does not touch the memory chips) and also the switch chip on the lower card.
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Figure 6: Lower card with its heatsink detached.
Each printed circuit board has eight GDDR3 512-Mbit 1.4 ns chips from Samsung (K4J52324QC-BC14), making 512 MB for each board and 1 GB total. These chips can run up to 1.4 GHz (700 MHz DDR). On this video card the memory chips are overclocked and run at 1.55 GHz, 150 MHz (10.71%) above the maximum clock rate labeled for these memory chips.
On Figure 7 you can see the switch chip used to connect the two GeForce 7950 chips to the single x16 PCI Express slot.
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Figure 7: Switch chip.
On Figure 8 you can see one of the GeForce 7950 chips used on this video card. As you can see, it is internally called G71-D by nVidia.
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Figure 8: GeForce 7950 chip.
