Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 3GB Video Card tested with Catalyst 12.2

The Card

Checking out the card you can see this one isn't quite as fancy as the other Sapphire HD 7950 we looked out. Outside of the cooler, though, there are no changes with two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors at the back of the card and two CrossFire connectors at the front.

Finally we finish off on the I/O side of things where we find a Dual Link DVI connector, HDMI port and two MiniDP connectors to round off the back of the card.

Specifications

Looking at the specifications of the Sapphire HD 7950 here today you can see that they've chosen to overclock the core by 10MHz. Normally we'd be annoyed with such a small overclock, but Sapphire don't actually market the card as an "Overclocked" edition version.

As for the 3GB of GDDR5 memory nothing changes there with the default 5GHz QDR clock being present. Because today, though, we wanted to compare this card against the reference clocked HIS card we looked at which carried the default 800MHz clock, we've bumped the core down to the default 800MHz clock. This just makes our comparison fair in our benchmarks today.