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today's video is going to be about the Sapphire Radeon hd7950 and I guess the

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7950 in general although I'll be testing it a couple of different ways so first

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of all a quick overview of the card it's a 7950 which means that aside from the

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fact that it's got a custom PCB okay it's got a custom shroud with

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custom dual 92mm fan Cooling big old fat

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heat pipes for also for cooling right

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there big fin array um heat spreader for

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all the memory and vrm and all that good stuff you can see that down here the

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black piece it's got up to four displays out with DVI HDMI and dual mini display

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ports it is a PCI Express 3.0 card 2 PCI

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E power other than that it is a completely normal 7950 except this is an

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overclock Edition so this is an overclocked card so I'm going to be testing it two ways I'm going to test it

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in its default config and then I'm going to manually dial it down to regular 7950

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to see how much performance we're getting by buying this overclocked card

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versus a different one in terms of the competition we've got quite a few things

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because this is a Next Generation card it's an overclocked card I'm going to be

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comparing it against not only things that are somewhat Fair like the GTX 570

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and 580 which are in sort of similar price bands and they similar types of

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products but also the GTX 590 which is a

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dual GPU C the HD

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6970 as well as 6950 with the Dual BIOS

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switch on this particular card I can test it either way although it is a 6970

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I just hit the switch to position two and I can test it as a 6950 I'm also

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comparing it to its Big Brother the 7970 although that is a 100% vanilla card so

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we're going to see how this overclocked Edition Compares not only to the 7970

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but also to what it itself would be if it wasn't overclocked

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before we get to benchmarking results I want to walk you guys through the card a little bit so here it is on my test

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bench I actually haven't seen the performance numbers of this particular

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card yet but I want to start with another number that's very interesting

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so due to the 28 nanometer manufacturing process and some clever engineering from

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AMD this system idles at 86 Watts from

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the wall unfreaking believable the card is near silent so even over my Corsair

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reach 70 and Noctua fans you can

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probably only start to pick up these fans at idle at about this far away

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whoops uh at probably about 3 or 4 in

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away so that's uh that's very cool makes the system very quiet because you can

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see the Corsair fan also doesn't spin when the power consumption is very low

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bear in mind with that 86 Watts at the wall this is an overclock to 4 GHz core

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i7 2600k with no Intel power saving

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features enabled on it so it's at 4 GHz right now simply

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astounding oh oh yeah finally idle temperatures so we're also going to log

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the temperatures during our Benchmark and find out how hot it gets during a gaming load so at default 7950 clocks

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that's where we took these power measurements and temperature readings we

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are peaking at 55° and I'm going to have to fire up a

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game again in order to check the power cuz I forgot with load power

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consumption just north of 200 wats so

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that means with this 80 plus gold power supply which check it out the fan isn't

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even spinning in a game scenario um

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we're actually only powering giving the system about 200 watts of power with

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about 220 WTS being pulled from the wall with the card at its 900 MHz default

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overclocked speed we are only 1 degree higher at idle and just a touch higher

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in terms of power consumption at the wall uh it hovers around 90° give or

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take just idling at the desktop so now let's fire it up and see what kind of

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performance numbers we can get out of it power consumption again in The Witcher 2

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seems to be pretty much identical and uh

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this stands to reason cuz I haven't actually changed any voltage settings to

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uh to undervolt it and then to re overvolt it back to its default speed of

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900 MHz so let's have a look at our

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maximum temperature which is 56 so we managed to get one Dee toastier there

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there's a 56 there somewhere and it stays very very quiet I also noticed

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that this particular card exhibits significantly less coil wine sorry about

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the focus there guys than most of the AMD reference cards that I have

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encountered whether it's that one that one or that one so that was a huge

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positive surprise for me so I'm going to go ahead and compile the results and our

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oh I showed you power yeah I showed you power consumption I showed you load Temps at the overclock speed so let's

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have a look at the performance I used crisis 2 The Witcher as well as

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Battlefield 3 so if you guys really care to analyze this then you can go ahead

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and freeze the frame here and you can see all of the data including min max

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and average for the three games that we're testing and all of the cards I just want to clarify one thing this is

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the 7970 this is the 7970 with a 7950

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BIOS on it because I wanted to see how closely it would perform to a 7950 at

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stock speed uh with the uh with the with

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the BIOS flash to 7950 cuz I was really hoping I'd be able to do the same thing

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that I do with my 6970 where I can use it as a 6 970 or 6950 but it looks like

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the 7900 series doesn't disable the functional units if you flash it with a

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different BIOS so that's what that weird cryptic B2 result is I have the 7950 OC

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so the sapphire OC card and then I turned it down to stock 7950 speed so we

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can get those results as well so other

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than that it should be fairly self-explanatory one other thing that's going to stand out to you guys is that

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in Battlefield 3 the 6990 didn't seem to

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be performing right although I just I included it anyway because honestly it's

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been my experience with the 6990 overall hence it

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being shelv at the moment over there literally sheld um that it's just a bear

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to work with it's not very consistent so GTX 590 is the big winner with 797

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outperforming everything else in spite of it being a single GPU card the 7950

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OC does perform a little bit better although if we go back to the minmax

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average you can see that the overclocked minimum

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is significantly better than the stock minimum so it does seem to be

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helping there you go there's those results average

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FPS then we got crisis 2 so crisis 2 the two dual GPU cards are pretty much neck

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and neck sorry I didn't add the data labels there you go oh and I didn't

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change the formatting here whatever you guys you guys are cool you don't mind

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waiting

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h hold on there we go fixed it those are

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legible so the Dual GPU cards lead the way the

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7970 um comes in second with the GTX 580

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exactly tied with the 7950 OC making the 7950 OC a significantly better value and

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this one also we see a fairly different performance level from the overclocked

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card versus the stock card something to be noted here is that these dual GPU

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cards neither of them scale particularly well which means we're probably running

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into a CPU bound scenario around 130 FPS

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on this game finally The Witcher 2 very very GPU bound so you can see the Dual

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GPU cards do pull away the 7970 performs

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at the top of the single gpus with the 7950 coming in just behind it so we're

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going to add the data labels there and we're going to go and yeah yeah yeah

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yeah yeah move those decimals so you guys don't have to look at completely

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illegible numbers sack fixed

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okay and then the NVIDIA cards really fall down at the bottom of the Heap of

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this one with the last generation AMD card so this game really shows the power

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of the 7950 with the OC card coming in

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somewhere between a 7950 stock card and a 7970 which is significantly more

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expensive so there you have it 28 Nom

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architecture delivers awesome power consumption great performance it's a

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dual BIOS card supporting ifinity with up to four displays the Dual fans run

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cool and quiet I'm actually really impressed with the cooler on this

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particular card so thank you for checking out this performance review and

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overview of the sapphire 7950 OC don't forget to subscribe to lus techtips for

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