welcome to my unboxing of something that's actually fairly exciting this is
the Radeon hd7950 this is a bit of a step down from
the 7970 but they haven't actually reduced
the performance that much so today not only do I have a Radeon hd7950 to unbox
and take a bit of a look at but I have a
particularly special one so this is the
XFX Double D and uh that is not to say
that it goes here necessarily but rather to say that it is double dissipation so
that means they've put um hold
on an aftermarket cooler on what is
otherwise still a reference 7950 so you
can rest assured that you're getting the quality that goes along with a reference
board or whatever else but you are also getting two fans for removing heat from
your card so what does XS have to say about it let's go with that first and
then we'll open up the card itself so it has 3 gigs of memory for Max effect and
resolutions I'm sure they mean effects and resolutions um but yeah basically
what that means is that if you're running even three monitors in ifinity
mode you're going to have enough of a frame buffer in order to not suffer from
a serious performance leg that results when the graphics memory fills up and
you have to go to your hard drive which is slow or even system memory or
anywhere else it's slower than Graphics memory Next Generation performance they
are very correct about that even though this is not a topof the range card it
does perform as well or better than NVIDIA's premium GTX 580 ghost thermal
maximizes air flow for exceptional venting throughout the card that's interesting we'll have to have a look at
that what else we got here multim monitor difference yep okay so it does
support Infinity up to four monitors unique dual
fan design allows air to cool everything including including
thermal including GPU heat sncs components in the PCB board so that I'll
believe okay what else we got here oh five star support register your product
and get industry leading festar support yeah make sure you
register okay gen Ultra bandwidth kpci
3.0 yes it does have PCI 3.0 so we'll
talk about that a little bit more after okay tessellation
bullet physics engine resident textures
okay these are probably kind of extreme examples but basically more better than
before hydrocell thermal solution
interesting condensation Wicks evaporation Wicks okay so they're talking about uh
basically uh what are they called again Vapor Chambers yep superial thermal
perfect for overclocking okay cool let's
get it opened up first we have a little
brochure for their Pro Series power supplies other great XFX products
including adapters Hardware limited warranty let's have a look at oh okay so
they want you to go and check it out on XFX force.com quick install guide driver
CD install guide okay and there's the
driver CD next we've got uh a crossfire Bridge
as well as an HDMI 2 DVI adapter that's
an interesting one you don't see that included with video cards very often
we've also got one of XFX is trademark
uh door hangers I've actually got one in the in this room over here check it out
this is an older one this is from back when XFX did uh NVIDIA graphics cards
but there see now I have another one to go with it pretty cool and these are
handy because they also keep your serial number and all that cool information on
the back of it so that means that you can
uh not have to pull the card out of your system if you ever need to look anything
up on the xfs XFX website or register it
or whatever else so let's open up the double dissipation
7950 and have a look at it so these are
two are these 90 mil fans hold on a sec
sorry so yes that is two 90 92 mil fans
uh over a huge wow look at this oh this is interesting so this is what they mean
by this over a huge heat sink array so
you can see the heat sink goes all the way from here down to here it's got a
bit of a stepped appearance going on so that means it can benefit not only from
the air that is blowing directly down onto the PCB but also some of that
incidental air flow that comes from around the edge of the spinning fan so
you can see they built up the heat sink in these areas in order to take
advantage of that you can see we've got a sleeved connector here that provides
power for one two fans um and then you
can see what they mean this is their this is their interesting cooler design
here so they've actually left it quite open around the bottom of the card so
here's our PCI Express 3.0 16x slot and
what that means is that some of the incidental air flow from these fans is going to cool not only the graphics card
itself but also your motherboard below it now with some last generation
products from both the AMD and the NVIDIA side a design like this wasn't
really an option because they needed all the airf flow possible from these fans
in order to keep the graphics card cool enough but the 7950 is actually
significantly cooler running and more efficient than some of these last
generation products due to the improved
manufacturing process so we're able to take advantage of some of this air flow
and use it to cool the rest of your system and ensure that not only does
your graphics card run stable but so does your entire PC on the back you can
see the other the uh the end of this aluminum shroud goes right here on the
top this is a very nice touch check this out so not only you can see it's quite
open you can see those fan blades in there see me spinning them so that same
that same kind of uh thinking although I don't see how it's nearly as beneficial
here but I guess what it does is it also provides less restriction for the fans
overall so not only can you exhaust air out the back of the card uh not so much
out this side but out here you can also
exhaust all the air from your fans all around the card which means that they're
not going to be very restricted but XFX has included instead of a plastic accent
here they've included an aluminum accent it's got kind of a brushed finish to it
just like the rest of the cooler that looks very very sharp it's branded with
their ghost thermal technology bit here as well as their XFX r7950 thing that's
going on here the good news about this entire cooler is that none of the
numbers can fall off like I had happened during my 7970 unboxing
video now let's have a look at the back of this card this is not a reference
board so I was mistaken this is an aftermarket cooler on an aftermarket
board it looks like they're probably using the reference design but this is
clearly an XFX style matte black PCB so
there you go guys um I stand corrected
on that you can see all of the memory chips are installed on the other side of
the PCB so that's 3 gigs of RAM over there our vrms are here our power is
here you can see there are pin outs for a six pin and an 8 Pin but the card
itself due to its lower power requirements compared to the 7970 only
uses dual 6 pins we've got two Crossfire connectors so that is for well
connecting to other cards to run in crossfire I've already talked about the
PCI Express 3.0 so that is Gen 3 PCIe
connector on the bottom but what I should also mention is that it is fully
backwards compatible with a PCI Express Gen 2 or even PCI Express gen 1
motherboard so don't worry about that although if you go all the way back to a gen one board you're probably going to
be bottlenecking this graphics card with the interface itself however
this graphics card is still by I mean when it's saturating a PCIe gen 1
interface is still going to be more than any CPU that runs on that motherboard is
going to be able to keep up with anyway so the bottleneck will still exist on
the CPU side not with the PCI Express
interface so now let's go ahead and have a look at what we've got for inputs and
outputs oh I see why we have an HDMI to DVI adapter it's so that we can easily
run dual DVI since most people running two displays are using that and then
with four displays you can go either DVI HDMI mini DisplayPort mini DisplayPort
or DVI DVI via adapter mini DisplayPort
mini DisplayPort we've got a little XFX branded exhaust slot going on there and
I think that pretty much covers it so what is the benefit of the 7950 well the
7950 is cheaper than the 7970 we covered
that already overclocks like a beast even though the reference stock clock
speed is only 800 mahz these cards have been seen already going up around the
1,000 MHz or 1 GHz Mark so what that
means is we're looking at 20 to 25%
overclocks on an Enthusiast level graphics card which hasn't been seen in
a fair while so I guess not only did AMD
achieve better thermal performance and better power consumption with their new
manufacturing process but also better overclocking headro so thank you for
checking out my unboxing and first look at the XFX 7950 Double D don't forget to
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