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better late than never that's what I say and I hope you guys agree this will be

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my oh I don't know where my knife is there it is this will be my unboxing and

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first look at the Radeon hd7950 from Sapphire now there's

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something a little bit special about this particular hd7950 from Sapphire and

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that is that in addition to being a non-reference design

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so that is to say it comes on a non-reference PCB which we've come to

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expect from 7950 it also has a non-reference cooler and it is overclock

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so it's a 3 gig card has support for their tricks uh tweak and overclock

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utility for Sapphire graphics cards it comes with an HDMI cable okay so this is

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all very interesting there's a lot of stuff here but we're going to cover most

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of this when we get a little bit further in so much like the radon HD ah here we

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go 7970 so this is an oem card with the

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completely um yeah dull as anything uh

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reference cooler reference PCB so unlike similarly to the 7970 it uses the

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Tahiti core so that is a 28 nmet GPU and

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the difference is that it has slightly fewer functional units than the 7970 and

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in its default configuration anyway it is clocked a little bit lower both of

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these graphics cards have 3 gigs of memory and they're using the latest 28

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nanom manufacturing process in order to achieve outstanding performance with

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really what is um was previously thought

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to be completely unbelievable power consumption not unbelievable in a bad

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way unbelievable in a good way we're not talking like you know GTX 480 here we're

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talking like seems like it could be like a 2600

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Pro in terms of the power consumption at Idol but it is actually a full-fledged

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gaming card so Inside the Box we find the driver installation disc we find a

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quick installation guide we find a

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product registration card probably a good idea to use that okay Crossfire

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Bridge lots of wow look at all this stuff comes with lots of stuff so we've

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got two eight pin two oh no we have a two Molex two PCIe six pin

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adapters there's the 1.8 m HDMI cable

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that they claimed was included and I have now validated that it is actually

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included we also get a mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort adapter a HDMI to DVI

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adapter although it should be noted that this will only work for single link DVI

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so that is up to 1920 x 1200 at 60 HZ

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because you are still relying on the HDMI port which is only single link

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we've also got a DVI to VGA adapter so we can go ahead and throw all these back

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in here and let's have a look at the card itself

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so yes I have all these other cards over here and I'm definitely I'm definitely

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getting to that that's going to be more of a more of a size comparison thing

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than anything else there we go wow that's actually a gorgeous looking card

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so here we have it the sapphire hd7950 it has dual 92mm cooling fans on

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a very very robust looking cooler so

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check this out we've got dual thick heat pipes and then triple thinner heat pipes

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P all of them are taking heat away from the GPU core itself which you can

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actually see right there from the GPU core itself as far away as possible uh

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to the aluminum fins that are cooling it so what you'll notice is that they use

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the thicker heat pipes for the greater distances in order to make sure that

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we're carrying heat effectively away even over here so that this fan actually

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has heat to carry away from the metal in order to cool the GPU itself it uses a

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very very open design so you can see as I turn it around

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the Fan's air flow is not impeded pretty much in any way by a shroud or any other

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characteristics of the cooler itself so it's got a plastic shroud right here and

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then it's see that free air flow coming from the fans down out around the GPU

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what this means is a couple of things so one it means that heat is being expelled

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into your case so if you don't have a decent case that you know has intake

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fans and exhaust fans if you're using like a crummy sort of mini tower or

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something like that you might not prefer a card like this you might prefer one

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that sticks with a more reference design which is an external exhaust blower fan

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like that however if you do have a decent case these are usually much more

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effective than those reference coolers at removing heat from the GPU the memory

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and the vrm and at the cost that you do

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expel some of the heat into your case so

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yeah yeah something to consider uh what actually speaking of vrm what are we

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doing for vrm cooling oh this is kind of smart check this out so they've got the

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the usual sort of GPU cooling thing going on here but then they've also

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added a heat spreader so you see this black piece right here that goes pretty

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much all the way around and wraps up here around the top so that's covering

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up all the memory modules all three gigs of memory are actually located you can

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see the positions of them are located on this side of the PCB uh some of the

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other vrm components are not covered by a heat sink but they do have direct air

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flow from a fan coming down on them from the top so I right I was saying

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advantages and drawbacks of these coolers right so they tend to be cooler

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and quieter than reference coolers but the drawback is that they do exhaust the

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heat into your case so just make sure you got a decent case or like me no

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case that is another solution okay so

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what other characteristics here so you saw the two included MOX to six pin PCIe

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adapters that's because this card requires two two PCI Express six pin

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adapters you can see on it actually this is kind of interesting yeah so this is a

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completely non-reference card okay you can see on it that there was room for an

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a pin adapter here but they did not deem

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that to be necessary remember the Tahiti Pro so that's the 7950 does not require

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as much power as the 7970 in terms of output options these are very similar to

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what we're used to seeing on these cards it does support up to four display

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ifinity so that is DVI HDMI and two Mini

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display ports right here and on the back

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I guess there's not much else to say about it now why do I have all these

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cards here right let's get to that this is an overclocked card so what I want to

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find out because I've never actually taken a look at a not overclocked

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actually this is more like this yeah there we go I've never actually taken a

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look at a non overclocked 7950 so one of the things I tried to do tonight was

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flash my 7970 reference card with a 7950

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BIOS to see if I could actually turn off some of the shaders so that I could

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compare this against like a fully referenced 7950 uh but I'm not able to do that

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unfortunately it just turns down the clock speed it doesn't turn down the shaders so what I'm going to be doing is

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I'm going to be taking this overclocked version of the card and I'm going to see

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how it Compares against a itself at stock clock speed so I'll just turn dial

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them back to reference clocks using the uh the included uh overclocking utility

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which can also be used for underclock focking and then I also want to compare

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it against a wide variety of other cards so here I have a 6990 GTX 590 I have a

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7970 GTX 580 I have the 7950 which will

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be OC and not OC but it'll be the same card I'm just going to change the clock

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speeds I have a GTX 570 and I have a

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6970 6950 so I use the BIOS uh switch in

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order to switch this card between those two different bioses because this one

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can be locked and unlocked so stay tuned online as Tech tips for a closer look at

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this card we're also going to profile the overall noise and heat

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characteristics of it and thank you for checking out my unboxing don't forget to

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