Sapphire HD 7950 OC Dual Fan 3GB Video Card Review & Benchmarks Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,616 words · ~8 min read
0:07
today's video is going to be about the Sapphire Radeon hd7950 and I guess the
0:11
7950 in general although I'll be testing it a couple of different ways so first
0:15
of all a quick overview of the card it's a 7950 which means that aside from the
0:21
fact that it's got a custom PCB okay it's got a custom shroud with
0:26
custom dual 92mm fan Cooling big old fat
0:30
heat pipes for also for cooling right
0:33
there big fin array um heat spreader for
0:37
all the memory and vrm and all that good stuff you can see that down here the
0:41
black piece it's got up to four displays out with DVI HDMI and dual mini display
0:47
ports it is a PCI Express 3.0 card 2 PCI
0:50
E power other than that it is a completely normal 7950 except this is an
0:56
overclock Edition so this is an overclocked card so I'm going to be testing it two ways I'm going to test it
1:00
in its default config and then I'm going to manually dial it down to regular 7950
1:04
to see how much performance we're getting by buying this overclocked card
1:08
versus a different one in terms of the competition we've got quite a few things
1:12
because this is a Next Generation card it's an overclocked card I'm going to be
1:16
comparing it against not only things that are somewhat Fair like the GTX 570
1:21
and 580 which are in sort of similar price bands and they similar types of
1:25
products but also the GTX 590 which is a
1:28
dual GPU C the HD
1:32
6970 as well as 6950 with the Dual BIOS
1:36
switch on this particular card I can test it either way although it is a 6970
1:40
I just hit the switch to position two and I can test it as a 6950 I'm also
1:45
comparing it to its Big Brother the 7970 although that is a 100% vanilla card so
1:51
we're going to see how this overclocked Edition Compares not only to the 7970
1:56
but also to what it itself would be if it wasn't overclocked
2:00
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
2:04
bench I actually haven't seen the performance numbers of this particular
2:07
card yet but I want to start with another number that's very interesting
2:11
so due to the 28 nanometer manufacturing process and some clever engineering from
2:16
AMD this system idles at 86 Watts from
2:20
the wall unfreaking believable the card is near silent so even over my Corsair
2:24
reach 70 and Noctua fans you can
2:28
probably only start to pick up these fans at idle at about this far away
2:33
whoops uh at probably about 3 or 4 in
2:36
away so that's uh that's very cool makes the system very quiet because you can
2:40
see the Corsair fan also doesn't spin when the power consumption is very low
2:44
bear in mind with that 86 Watts at the wall this is an overclock to 4 GHz core
2:48
i7 2600k with no Intel power saving
2:52
features enabled on it so it's at 4 GHz right now simply
2:57
astounding oh oh yeah finally idle temperatures so we're also going to log
3:02
the temperatures during our Benchmark and find out how hot it gets during a gaming load so at default 7950 clocks
3:08
that's where we took these power measurements and temperature readings we
3:11
are peaking at 55° and I'm going to have to fire up a
3:15
game again in order to check the power cuz I forgot with load power
3:19
consumption just north of 200 wats so
3:24
that means with this 80 plus gold power supply which check it out the fan isn't
3:27
even spinning in a game scenario um
3:31
we're actually only powering giving the system about 200 watts of power with
3:35
about 220 WTS being pulled from the wall with the card at its 900 MHz default
3:40
overclocked speed we are only 1 degree higher at idle and just a touch higher
3:46
in terms of power consumption at the wall uh it hovers around 90° give or
3:51
take just idling at the desktop so now let's fire it up and see what kind of
3:55
performance numbers we can get out of it power consumption again in The Witcher 2
3:59
seems to be pretty much identical and uh
4:03
this stands to reason cuz I haven't actually changed any voltage settings to
4:07
uh to undervolt it and then to re overvolt it back to its default speed of
4:11
900 MHz so let's have a look at our
4:16
maximum temperature which is 56 so we managed to get one Dee toastier there
4:22
there's a 56 there somewhere and it stays very very quiet I also noticed
4:26
that this particular card exhibits significantly less coil wine sorry about
4:31
the focus there guys than most of the AMD reference cards that I have
4:35
encountered whether it's that one that one or that one so that was a huge
4:41
positive surprise for me so I'm going to go ahead and compile the results and our
4:46
oh I showed you power yeah I showed you power consumption I showed you load Temps at the overclock speed so let's
4:51
have a look at the performance I used crisis 2 The Witcher as well as
4:55
Battlefield 3 so if you guys really care to analyze this then you can go ahead
5:00
and freeze the frame here and you can see all of the data including min max
5:03
and average for the three games that we're testing and all of the cards I just want to clarify one thing this is
5:09
the 7970 this is the 7970 with a 7950
5:13
BIOS on it because I wanted to see how closely it would perform to a 7950 at
5:18
stock speed uh with the uh with the with
5:23
the BIOS flash to 7950 cuz I was really hoping I'd be able to do the same thing
5:26
that I do with my 6970 where I can use it as a 6 970 or 6950 but it looks like
5:31
the 7900 series doesn't disable the functional units if you flash it with a
5:35
different BIOS so that's what that weird cryptic B2 result is I have the 7950 OC
5:40
so the sapphire OC card and then I turned it down to stock 7950 speed so we
5:45
can get those results as well so other
5:49
than that it should be fairly self-explanatory one other thing that's going to stand out to you guys is that
5:54
in Battlefield 3 the 6990 didn't seem to
5:57
be performing right although I just I included it anyway because honestly it's
6:01
been my experience with the 6990 overall hence it
6:04
being shelv at the moment over there literally sheld um that it's just a bear
6:11
to work with it's not very consistent so GTX 590 is the big winner with 797
6:16
outperforming everything else in spite of it being a single GPU card the 7950
6:21
OC does perform a little bit better although if we go back to the minmax
6:26
average you can see that the overclocked minimum
6:30
is significantly better than the stock minimum so it does seem to be
6:34
helping there you go there's those results average
6:38
FPS then we got crisis 2 so crisis 2 the two dual GPU cards are pretty much neck
6:44
and neck sorry I didn't add the data labels there you go oh and I didn't
6:48
change the formatting here whatever you guys you guys are cool you don't mind
6:54
waiting
6:58
h hold on there we go fixed it those are
7:02
legible so the Dual GPU cards lead the way the
7:06
7970 um comes in second with the GTX 580
7:10
exactly tied with the 7950 OC making the 7950 OC a significantly better value and
7:16
this one also we see a fairly different performance level from the overclocked
7:20
card versus the stock card something to be noted here is that these dual GPU
7:24
cards neither of them scale particularly well which means we're probably running
7:27
into a CPU bound scenario around 130 FPS
7:31
on this game finally The Witcher 2 very very GPU bound so you can see the Dual
7:36
GPU cards do pull away the 7970 performs
7:41
at the top of the single gpus with the 7950 coming in just behind it so we're
7:46
going to add the data labels there and we're going to go and yeah yeah yeah
7:51
yeah yeah move those decimals so you guys don't have to look at completely
7:55
illegible numbers sack fixed
8:02
okay and then the NVIDIA cards really fall down at the bottom of the Heap of
8:06
this one with the last generation AMD card so this game really shows the power
8:11
of the 7950 with the OC card coming in
8:15
somewhere between a 7950 stock card and a 7970 which is significantly more
8:20
expensive so there you have it 28 Nom
8:23
architecture delivers awesome power consumption great performance it's a
8:28
dual BIOS card supporting ifinity with up to four displays the Dual fans run
8:33
cool and quiet I'm actually really impressed with the cooler on this
8:36
particular card so thank you for checking out this performance review and
8:40
overview of the sapphire 7950 OC don't forget to subscribe to lus techtips for
8:44
more reviews unboxings and other computer videos