Introduction

At the launch of the new HD 7950 we checked out a pair of pre-overclocked Sapphire cards in CrossFire. Today we check out the other HD 7950 the company is offering and see how it goes with the latest WHQL driver from AMD which is the first official driver for the HD 7900 series.

Outside of our normal Catalyst article we expanded upon our testing when we looked at the Diamond HD 7970 where we tested our complete benchmark line up on the latest driver and found some nice improvements.

Having not yet tested the HD 7950 with the latest driver we figured with another HD 7950 arriving, this was a good opportunity to see what was going on with the latest driver and the HD 7950. Of course we haven't looked at the Sapphire card we've got here today, so there's a few things we need to do.

The first thing we need to look at is the bundle to see what Sapphire is offering us in that department. Once we've done that we'll move onto the card and see just exactly what's going on before checking out the specifications. Once we've done that we'll quickly cover our testbed and then simply get stuck into the performance side of things.

Package

In typical Sapphire fashion we've got a pretty nice bundle going on here. Alongside the standard paperwork and driver CD we've got CrossFire connector, two Molex to 6-pin PCI Express power connectors, HDMI cable, MiniDP to DP connector, DVI to VGA connector and finally a HDMI to DVI connector to round out the bundle.