7950GTX sli only slightly better than 7900GS in Alienware M9700

I have an Alienware M9700 which I'm currently readying for sale. I also have a whole bunch of MXM graphics cards.

Just out of curiosity (but also with getting a better sale price in mind) I took out the 2x7900GS cards and replaced them with 2x7950GTX cards. I did a complete uninstall and clean re-install of Nvidia drivers.

I was expecting to see significant improvement. However, when I ran some benchmarks I was surprised to see that the 7950GTX cards only performed slightly better than the 7900GS cards! I was so surprised by the lack of increase in performance that I had to double-check that the 7950s were running in SLi which they were.

Is it possible that the Turion 64 processor is holding the 7950s back so much that they only perform slightly better than the 7900s?

I did a fair amount of testing but could only get probably 10% max increase out of the 7950s! Surely this can't be right, can it?

 

I don't know much about alienwares as this m15x is my first alienware, which I love. However I do know that on my previous Dell XPS laptops, the 7950's were not that great as they had very minimal improvements over 7900 GTX, needless to say if you overclocked you'd have the same thing. However you should always know that it's pretty much worthless to upgrade within the same series of a card, as you're ultimately wasting more money then anything else. Meaning, if you have a gs version you shouldn't move to a GTX and just move to a whole new series of cards. IT's money better spent.

Anyways getting back on topic about the 7950, I felt that the 7950 was really only released because it had support of the HD video Decoding. At the time HD DVD and Blu Ray were on the rise and HD video encoding was an upcoming thing. Since then I'd say the hype has died a little, but the greatest gain the 7950 offered was that. We're talking the gain was only suppose to be 10% at Most. more like 5% and thus that's why you're not suppose to spend the cash to get a <10% performance increase.

Sorry, I think most people would agree with me here. Of course how you spend your money is your own business, I'm just saying....

 

It was just an exercise in curiosity really - like I said I have a bunch of MXM cards, probably half a dozen 7950GTXs and around the same number of 7900GSs. Not surprisingly, the 7950s ran a lot hotter than the 7900s!

Maybe I should sell all these cards rather than just have them lying around just to play with!!!.....

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=468913

 

any chance you want to sell one of those 7950s?