MaximumPC 2006 09

reviewsTESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED

72 MA XIMUMPC SEPTEMBER 2006

T

hanks to the GeForce 750 G82 at the

heart of BFG’s latest offering, you can

now build a dual-GeForce rig using

any PCI Express-compliant motherboard—

including CrossFire and Intel models.

As much as the 750 G82 sounds like

SLI in a single slot, n6idia pointedly does

not describe it as such. The company is

also not allowing the do-it-yourself crowd

to use two G82s to build their own quad-

SLI systems. And that’s fine with us: The

current crop of 0-inch panels that would

render quad SLI worthwhile aren’t fast

enough for gaming anyway.

Architecturally, the 750 G82 resembles

the 700 GT8: It’s outfitted with 24 pixel-

shader units and eight vertex-shader

units, and is paired with 512MB of GDD2

memory. In order to maintain reasonable

thermals, however, the core is clocked

at just 500MHz and the memory runs at

600MHz. Factory-overclocked models were

coming onto the market as we went to

press, but this BFG card was clocked the

same as n6idia’s

reference design.

Specs like those

would have

been big news

six months ago,

but they’ve

become com-

monplace lately. What’s not so common is

the fact that every 750 G82 card has two

of these puppies.

A G82 card is formed by bolting

together two PCBs, but only one has a PCI

Express edge connector. A proprietary PCI

Express switch on the second PCB handles

communication between the two proces-

sors and interactions with the host PC’s

PCI Express bus. Although each board

has its own cooling fan, the G82 is whis-

per-quiet. There’s a pair of Dual-Link D6I

connectors, but as with conventional SLI,

output to the second D6I connector is shut

down while running in dual-GP5 mode.

There is S- and component-video output,

but no video input.

DRM COMES TO VIDEOCARDS

The 750 G82 is one of the first videocards

to feature the HDCP technology required to

play copy-protected Blu-ray and HD-D6D

movies. HDCP requires each component in

the digital playback chain—the disc drive,

the videocard, and the display—to be outfit-

ted with a crypto-2OM that stores a set of

encryption keys. These encryption keys are

also stored on each copy-protected Blu-ray

and HD-D6D disc.

+eys are exchanged at each stage of

digital playback: from

the disc to the drive,

from the drive to the

videocard, and from

the videocard to the

display. If at any point

in the path this hand-

shake fails to take

place, the sending

device can refuse to

pass on high-definition

data in digital form.

One obvious problem with this D2M

scheme is that the vast majority of digital

displays in use today are not HDCP capa-

ble, which will force users to revert to ana-

log video connections (6GA or component)

in order to enjoy high-definition video. But

there’s an aspect of AACS that’s capable

of blocking that avenue, too: It’s called

the Image Constraint Token (ICT). Discs

encoded using ICT will restrict video output

to a maximum resolution of 60x540 the

moment the HDCP chain is broken. There

are rumors that the ICT won’t be enabled

by Hollywood studios until after 2010, but

no official word has come down.

What’s even more troubling about

HDCP, however, is the fact that if any

device in the playback chain—or even an

entire model line—is ever determined to

have been compromised, meaning its copy-

protection has been hacked or otherwise

defeated, it can be placed on a blacklist

that gets written to newly manufactured

copy-protected discs. These discs will then

refuse to send high-definition digital data to

any device in that blacklisted family.

SO HOW FAST IS IT?

The benchmark chart shows that the

750 G82 easily lives up to n6idia’s claim

that its the fastest single

videocard on the market.

BFG GeForce

7950 GX2

Does SLI by any other name smell as sweet?

nVidia technology enables BFG’s GeForce 7950 GX2 to deliver the

power of two fast videocards while requiring just one PCI Express slot.

7950 GX2 7900 GT / SLI 7900 GTX / SLI X1900 XTX/ CROSSFIRE

Scores other than HQV represent frames per second at the native resolution of a 23-inch Viewsonic VP2330wb display: 1920x1200. Each card was installed in an Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard with a dual-core 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-

60 and 2GB of Corsair DDR400 RAM.

3DMARK 06 GAME 1 19.4 12.5 / 22.7 15.0 / 27.2 18.4/ 32.0

3DMARK 06 GAME 2 27.3 17.6 / 33.1 20.7 / 38.1 20.0 / 35.2

FEAR 57.0 34.0 / 63.0 42.0 / 70.0 27.0 / 39.0

OBLIVION 22.9 16.1 / 15.9 19.5 / 20.2 21.2 / 21.2

QUAKE 4 89.2 49.2 / 83.6 66.7 / 113.8 58.0 / 92.7

HQV 88 88 / 88 88 / 88 63 / 0

BENCHMARKS

The dual 7950 GX2s in nVidia’s videocard

sandwich communicate via this tiny card

connecting the two circuit boards.

SPECS

'05 n6idia 750 G82 (x 2)

-%-/29 1GB GDD2 (512MB x 2)

#/2% #,/#+ 30%%$ 500MH:

-%-/29 600MHz

#,/#+ 30%%$