Introduction

While we'd normally look at the reference AMD card before anything else, due to the fact it was running a little late, we ended up checking out the XFX HD 7950 Black Edition Double Dissipation which came overclocked out of the box alongside the reference clocked HIS HD 7950 3GB.

Because we've already looked at a reference clocked card it seems completely pointless to turn around and benchmark the AMD HD 7950 in exactly the same way as we know that performance is going to be almost identical outside a bit of fluctuation. For that reason we'll be taking the time to overclock the new model and see just what kind of performance we're able to get out of a standard HD 7950.

What's even better is that the new Beta 11 of MSI Afterburner brings with it voltage adjustment for the new HD 7950 which means we'll be able to get a true idea of overclocking performance. Before we cover the overclocking side of things, there are a couple of things we need to do beforehand.

Normally we'd check out the package, but because we're dealing with a reference AMD card there is no package, instead on the next page we'll just move onto the card itself to see what the reference card looks like. Once we've done that we'll quickly cover the default clock speeds and then go into a bit more detail on the overclocking side of things. From there we'll move into the testbed side of things before we of course get into the performance of the AMD HD 7950 at our maximum overclock today. So with everything said and done, let's take a closer look at the card.