better late than never that's what I say and I hope you guys agree this will be
my oh I don't know where my knife is there it is this will be my unboxing and
first look at the Radeon hd7950 from Sapphire now there's
something a little bit special about this particular hd7950 from Sapphire and
that is that in addition to being a non-reference design
so that is to say it comes on a non-reference PCB which we've come to
expect from 7950 it also has a non-reference cooler and it is overclock
so it's a 3 gig card has support for their tricks uh tweak and overclock
utility for Sapphire graphics cards it comes with an HDMI cable okay so this is
all very interesting there's a lot of stuff here but we're going to cover most
of this when we get a little bit further in so much like the radon HD ah here we
go 7970 so this is an oem card with the
completely um yeah dull as anything uh
reference cooler reference PCB so unlike similarly to the 7970 it uses the
Tahiti core so that is a 28 nmet GPU and
the difference is that it has slightly fewer functional units than the 7970 and
in its default configuration anyway it is clocked a little bit lower both of
these graphics cards have 3 gigs of memory and they're using the latest 28
nanom manufacturing process in order to achieve outstanding performance with
really what is um was previously thought
to be completely unbelievable power consumption not unbelievable in a bad
way unbelievable in a good way we're not talking like you know GTX 480 here we're
talking like seems like it could be like a 2600
Pro in terms of the power consumption at Idol but it is actually a full-fledged
gaming card so Inside the Box we find the driver installation disc we find a
quick installation guide we find a
product registration card probably a good idea to use that okay Crossfire
Bridge lots of wow look at all this stuff comes with lots of stuff so we've
got two eight pin two oh no we have a two Molex two PCIe six pin
adapters there's the 1.8 m HDMI cable
that they claimed was included and I have now validated that it is actually
included we also get a mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort adapter a HDMI to DVI
adapter although it should be noted that this will only work for single link DVI
so that is up to 1920 x 1200 at 60 HZ
because you are still relying on the HDMI port which is only single link
we've also got a DVI to VGA adapter so we can go ahead and throw all these back
in here and let's have a look at the card itself
so yes I have all these other cards over here and I'm definitely I'm definitely
getting to that that's going to be more of a more of a size comparison thing
than anything else there we go wow that's actually a gorgeous looking card
so here we have it the sapphire hd7950 it has dual 92mm cooling fans on
a very very robust looking cooler so
check this out we've got dual thick heat pipes and then triple thinner heat pipes
P all of them are taking heat away from the GPU core itself which you can
actually see right there from the GPU core itself as far away as possible uh
to the aluminum fins that are cooling it so what you'll notice is that they use
the thicker heat pipes for the greater distances in order to make sure that
we're carrying heat effectively away even over here so that this fan actually
has heat to carry away from the metal in order to cool the GPU itself it uses a
very very open design so you can see as I turn it around
the Fan's air flow is not impeded pretty much in any way by a shroud or any other
characteristics of the cooler itself so it's got a plastic shroud right here and
then it's see that free air flow coming from the fans down out around the GPU
what this means is a couple of things so one it means that heat is being expelled
into your case so if you don't have a decent case that you know has intake
fans and exhaust fans if you're using like a crummy sort of mini tower or
something like that you might not prefer a card like this you might prefer one
that sticks with a more reference design which is an external exhaust blower fan
like that however if you do have a decent case these are usually much more
effective than those reference coolers at removing heat from the GPU the memory
and the vrm and at the cost that you do
expel some of the heat into your case so
yeah yeah something to consider uh what actually speaking of vrm what are we
doing for vrm cooling oh this is kind of smart check this out so they've got the
the usual sort of GPU cooling thing going on here but then they've also
added a heat spreader so you see this black piece right here that goes pretty
much all the way around and wraps up here around the top so that's covering
up all the memory modules all three gigs of memory are actually located you can
see the positions of them are located on this side of the PCB uh some of the
other vrm components are not covered by a heat sink but they do have direct air
flow from a fan coming down on them from the top so I right I was saying
advantages and drawbacks of these coolers right so they tend to be cooler
and quieter than reference coolers but the drawback is that they do exhaust the
heat into your case so just make sure you got a decent case or like me no
case that is another solution okay so
what other characteristics here so you saw the two included MOX to six pin PCIe
adapters that's because this card requires two two PCI Express six pin
adapters you can see on it actually this is kind of interesting yeah so this is a
completely non-reference card okay you can see on it that there was room for an
a pin adapter here but they did not deem
that to be necessary remember the Tahiti Pro so that's the 7950 does not require
as much power as the 7970 in terms of output options these are very similar to
what we're used to seeing on these cards it does support up to four display
ifinity so that is DVI HDMI and two Mini
display ports right here and on the back
I guess there's not much else to say about it now why do I have all these
cards here right let's get to that this is an overclocked card so what I want to
find out because I've never actually taken a look at a not overclocked
actually this is more like this yeah there we go I've never actually taken a
look at a non overclocked 7950 so one of the things I tried to do tonight was
flash my 7970 reference card with a 7950
BIOS to see if I could actually turn off some of the shaders so that I could
compare this against like a fully referenced 7950 uh but I'm not able to do that
unfortunately it just turns down the clock speed it doesn't turn down the shaders so what I'm going to be doing is
I'm going to be taking this overclocked version of the card and I'm going to see
how it Compares against a itself at stock clock speed so I'll just turn dial
them back to reference clocks using the uh the included uh overclocking utility
which can also be used for underclock focking and then I also want to compare
it against a wide variety of other cards so here I have a 6990 GTX 590 I have a
7970 GTX 580 I have the 7950 which will
be OC and not OC but it'll be the same card I'm just going to change the clock
speeds I have a GTX 570 and I have a
6970 6950 so I use the BIOS uh switch in
order to switch this card between those two different bioses because this one
can be locked and unlocked so stay tuned online as Tech tips for a closer look at
this card we're also going to profile the overall noise and heat
characteristics of it and thank you for checking out my unboxing don't forget to
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