today's video is going to be about the Sapphire Radeon hd7950 and I guess the
7950 in general although I'll be testing it a couple of different ways so first
of all a quick overview of the card it's a 7950 which means that aside from the
fact that it's got a custom PCB okay it's got a custom shroud with
custom dual 92mm fan Cooling big old fat
heat pipes for also for cooling right
there big fin array um heat spreader for
all the memory and vrm and all that good stuff you can see that down here the
black piece it's got up to four displays out with DVI HDMI and dual mini display
ports it is a PCI Express 3.0 card 2 PCI
E power other than that it is a completely normal 7950 except this is an
overclock Edition so this is an overclocked card so I'm going to be testing it two ways I'm going to test it
in its default config and then I'm going to manually dial it down to regular 7950
to see how much performance we're getting by buying this overclocked card
versus a different one in terms of the competition we've got quite a few things
because this is a Next Generation card it's an overclocked card I'm going to be
comparing it against not only things that are somewhat Fair like the GTX 570
and 580 which are in sort of similar price bands and they similar types of
products but also the GTX 590 which is a
dual GPU C the HD
6970 as well as 6950 with the Dual BIOS
switch on this particular card I can test it either way although it is a 6970
I just hit the switch to position two and I can test it as a 6950 I'm also
comparing it to its Big Brother the 7970 although that is a 100% vanilla card so
we're going to see how this overclocked Edition Compares not only to the 7970
but also to what it itself would be if it wasn't overclocked
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
bench I actually haven't seen the performance numbers of this particular
card yet but I want to start with another number that's very interesting
so due to the 28 nanometer manufacturing process and some clever engineering from
AMD this system idles at 86 Watts from
the wall unfreaking believable the card is near silent so even over my Corsair
reach 70 and Noctua fans you can
probably only start to pick up these fans at idle at about this far away
whoops uh at probably about 3 or 4 in
away so that's uh that's very cool makes the system very quiet because you can
see the Corsair fan also doesn't spin when the power consumption is very low
bear in mind with that 86 Watts at the wall this is an overclock to 4 GHz core
i7 2600k with no Intel power saving
features enabled on it so it's at 4 GHz right now simply
astounding oh oh yeah finally idle temperatures so we're also going to log
the temperatures during our Benchmark and find out how hot it gets during a gaming load so at default 7950 clocks
that's where we took these power measurements and temperature readings we
are peaking at 55° and I'm going to have to fire up a
game again in order to check the power cuz I forgot with load power
consumption just north of 200 wats so
that means with this 80 plus gold power supply which check it out the fan isn't
even spinning in a game scenario um
we're actually only powering giving the system about 200 watts of power with
about 220 WTS being pulled from the wall with the card at its 900 MHz default
overclocked speed we are only 1 degree higher at idle and just a touch higher
in terms of power consumption at the wall uh it hovers around 90° give or
take just idling at the desktop so now let's fire it up and see what kind of
performance numbers we can get out of it power consumption again in The Witcher 2
seems to be pretty much identical and uh
this stands to reason cuz I haven't actually changed any voltage settings to
uh to undervolt it and then to re overvolt it back to its default speed of
900 MHz so let's have a look at our
maximum temperature which is 56 so we managed to get one Dee toastier there
there's a 56 there somewhere and it stays very very quiet I also noticed
that this particular card exhibits significantly less coil wine sorry about
the focus there guys than most of the AMD reference cards that I have
encountered whether it's that one that one or that one so that was a huge
positive surprise for me so I'm going to go ahead and compile the results and our
oh I showed you power yeah I showed you power consumption I showed you load Temps at the overclock speed so let's
have a look at the performance I used crisis 2 The Witcher as well as
Battlefield 3 so if you guys really care to analyze this then you can go ahead
and freeze the frame here and you can see all of the data including min max
and average for the three games that we're testing and all of the cards I just want to clarify one thing this is
the 7970 this is the 7970 with a 7950
BIOS on it because I wanted to see how closely it would perform to a 7950 at
stock speed uh with the uh with the with
the BIOS flash to 7950 cuz I was really hoping I'd be able to do the same thing
that I do with my 6970 where I can use it as a 6 970 or 6950 but it looks like
the 7900 series doesn't disable the functional units if you flash it with a
different BIOS so that's what that weird cryptic B2 result is I have the 7950 OC
so the sapphire OC card and then I turned it down to stock 7950 speed so we
can get those results as well so other
than that it should be fairly self-explanatory one other thing that's going to stand out to you guys is that
in Battlefield 3 the 6990 didn't seem to
be performing right although I just I included it anyway because honestly it's
been my experience with the 6990 overall hence it
being shelv at the moment over there literally sheld um that it's just a bear
to work with it's not very consistent so GTX 590 is the big winner with 797
outperforming everything else in spite of it being a single GPU card the 7950
OC does perform a little bit better although if we go back to the minmax
average you can see that the overclocked minimum
is significantly better than the stock minimum so it does seem to be
helping there you go there's those results average
FPS then we got crisis 2 so crisis 2 the two dual GPU cards are pretty much neck
and neck sorry I didn't add the data labels there you go oh and I didn't
change the formatting here whatever you guys you guys are cool you don't mind
waiting
h hold on there we go fixed it those are
legible so the Dual GPU cards lead the way the
7970 um comes in second with the GTX 580
exactly tied with the 7950 OC making the 7950 OC a significantly better value and
this one also we see a fairly different performance level from the overclocked
card versus the stock card something to be noted here is that these dual GPU
cards neither of them scale particularly well which means we're probably running
into a CPU bound scenario around 130 FPS
on this game finally The Witcher 2 very very GPU bound so you can see the Dual
GPU cards do pull away the 7970 performs
at the top of the single gpus with the 7950 coming in just behind it so we're
going to add the data labels there and we're going to go and yeah yeah yeah
yeah yeah move those decimals so you guys don't have to look at completely
illegible numbers sack fixed
okay and then the NVIDIA cards really fall down at the bottom of the Heap of
this one with the last generation AMD card so this game really shows the power
of the 7950 with the OC card coming in
somewhere between a 7950 stock card and a 7970 which is significantly more
expensive so there you have it 28 Nom
architecture delivers awesome power consumption great performance it's a
dual BIOS card supporting ifinity with up to four displays the Dual fans run
cool and quiet I'm actually really impressed with the cooler on this
particular card so thank you for checking out this performance review and
overview of the sapphire 7950 OC don't forget to subscribe to lus techtips for
more reviews unboxings and other computer videos