Introduction

It really feels like AMD are a little lost at the moment and don't know how to handle what NVIDIA are throwing at them. Normally you'd see a company take one of two approaches when it comes to combating a competitor. The first is you'd go and drop the price on your current video cards to bring them in at a stronger price point against the competition. The second option is that you'd release higher clocked models at a similar price point to what you have now to fight the competition.

The thing is, though, we've seen AMD do both of these things, which is a little weird. The price drop alone, though, hasn't helped AMD in the same way as you'd expect, because NVIDIA have come in at a much stronger price point than you'd normally expect. Because of this we saw AMD release the GHz Edition of its high-end HD 7970 and today we're looking at a new version of the Radeon HD 7950 that AMD have just released.

So what is AMD bringing to the table with new HD 7950 Boost? We'll find out in just a moment, first we need to take the time to check out what's going on with the package today which due to the nature of getting such an early sample from Sapphire means we don't have a retail box.

Once we've done that we'll move onto the card itself, check out the specifications and also talk a little about the new Boost feature that AMD have implemented. Once we've done that it will be time to move into the testbed, take a quick look at the cards that we'll be using in our graphs today and finally get into the performance side of things to see just what this new variation can offer.

Package

Looking at the box you can see the new design is similar to that we saw from the Vapor-X HD 7970 GHz Edition video card we looked at when it launched. You can see the new "Boost" feature is mentioned on the front of the box, along with a lot of the other standard information.

As for the bundle you can see we're lacking a driver CD which doesn't come as much of a surprise considering again the early nature of the video card when we received it.

You can see we've got a full size HDMI cable, CrossFire bridge, DVI to VGA connector along with two power connectors which include a Molex to 6-pin PCIe power connector and dual Molex to 8-pin PCIe power connector.