XFX Radeon HD 7950 Black Edition Double Dissipation 3GB Review

By: Shawn Baker (more) | Video Cards Content | Posted: Jan 31, 2012 5:01 am

Comment | Print | Email | Font Size: A A

TweakTown Rating: 94% Manufacturer: XFX

The Card

xfx_radeon_hd_7950_black_edition_double_dissipation_3gb_review

Moving onto the card we've got a near identical look to the HD 7970 version that uses the same Double D cooler. The main changes are seen in the power setup which is now dual 6-Pin PCIe connectors instead of an 8-Pin / 6-Pin PCIe connector setup. Closer to the front we have the same two CrossFire connectors but the BIOS switch isn't present.

The lack of the BIOS switch is an interesting one. There's clearly room for it and we'll see in time if companies choose to add it. If we do see it introduced, it could mean that we'll possibly see the ability to flash a HD 7970 BIOS to the card, much like we saw the HD 6970 BIOS flashed to HD 6950s. Of course this is just nothing more than speculation.

On the I/O side of things you can see we've got two mini DisplayPorts on the left, a single HDMI and a Dual-Link DVI connector on the far right. Connectivity lines up just as you'd expect with no real surprise present except for the fact that the port is red.

Specifications

On the specification side of things the new HD 7950 looks pretty strong against its bigger brother, the HD 7970. We've got the same 28nm fabrication process and a transistor count of 4.31B. Stream processors come in at 1,792 which is only slightly down on the 2,084 seen on the HD 7970.

Texture Units come in at 112 verses 128 while ROPs are the same at 32. The memory front is where we normally see the most changes, but this time it is actually extremely similar. We've got the same 384-bit memory bus along with the same 3GB of GDDR5 memory. The clock speed is where we see the main change with the HD 7950 rate coming in at 5GHz QDR verse 5.5GHz QDR which is seen on the HD 7970.

Being part of the Black Edition series mean that the card comes in overclocked. Looking above we can see that the core has been pushed to 900MHz while the 3GB of GDDR5 has been pushed in line with the HD 7970 coming in at 5.5GHz DDR. This is a really nice overclock and we should see performance similar to the reference HD 7970 thanks to XFX choosing to play a little with the clocks.