XFX Radeon HD 7950 DD Double Dissipation Video Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,759 words · ~8 min read
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welcome to my unboxing of something that's actually fairly exciting this is
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the Radeon hd7950 this is a bit of a step down from
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the 7970 but they haven't actually reduced
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the performance that much so today not only do I have a Radeon hd7950 to unbox
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and take a bit of a look at but I have a
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particularly special one so this is the
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XFX Double D and uh that is not to say
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that it goes here necessarily but rather to say that it is double dissipation so
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that means they've put um hold
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on an aftermarket cooler on what is
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otherwise still a reference 7950 so you
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can rest assured that you're getting the quality that goes along with a reference
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board or whatever else but you are also getting two fans for removing heat from
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your card so what does XS have to say about it let's go with that first and
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then we'll open up the card itself so it has 3 gigs of memory for Max effect and
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resolutions I'm sure they mean effects and resolutions um but yeah basically
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what that means is that if you're running even three monitors in ifinity
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mode you're going to have enough of a frame buffer in order to not suffer from
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a serious performance leg that results when the graphics memory fills up and
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you have to go to your hard drive which is slow or even system memory or
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anywhere else it's slower than Graphics memory Next Generation performance they
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are very correct about that even though this is not a topof the range card it
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does perform as well or better than NVIDIA's premium GTX 580 ghost thermal
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maximizes air flow for exceptional venting throughout the card that's interesting we'll have to have a look at
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that what else we got here multim monitor difference yep okay so it does
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support Infinity up to four monitors unique dual
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fan design allows air to cool everything including including
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thermal including GPU heat sncs components in the PCB board so that I'll
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believe okay what else we got here oh five star support register your product
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and get industry leading festar support yeah make sure you
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register okay gen Ultra bandwidth kpci
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3.0 yes it does have PCI 3.0 so we'll
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talk about that a little bit more after okay tessellation
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bullet physics engine resident textures
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okay these are probably kind of extreme examples but basically more better than
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before hydrocell thermal solution
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interesting condensation Wicks evaporation Wicks okay so they're talking about uh
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basically uh what are they called again Vapor Chambers yep superial thermal
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perfect for overclocking okay cool let's
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get it opened up first we have a little
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brochure for their Pro Series power supplies other great XFX products
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including adapters Hardware limited warranty let's have a look at oh okay so
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they want you to go and check it out on XFX force.com quick install guide driver
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CD install guide okay and there's the
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driver CD next we've got uh a crossfire Bridge
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as well as an HDMI 2 DVI adapter that's
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an interesting one you don't see that included with video cards very often
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we've also got one of XFX is trademark
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uh door hangers I've actually got one in the in this room over here check it out
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this is an older one this is from back when XFX did uh NVIDIA graphics cards
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but there see now I have another one to go with it pretty cool and these are
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handy because they also keep your serial number and all that cool information on
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the back of it so that means that you can
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uh not have to pull the card out of your system if you ever need to look anything
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up on the xfs XFX website or register it
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or whatever else so let's open up the double dissipation
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7950 and have a look at it so these are
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two are these 90 mil fans hold on a sec
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sorry so yes that is two 90 92 mil fans
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uh over a huge wow look at this oh this is interesting so this is what they mean
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by this over a huge heat sink array so
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you can see the heat sink goes all the way from here down to here it's got a
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bit of a stepped appearance going on so that means it can benefit not only from
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the air that is blowing directly down onto the PCB but also some of that
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incidental air flow that comes from around the edge of the spinning fan so
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you can see they built up the heat sink in these areas in order to take
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advantage of that you can see we've got a sleeved connector here that provides
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power for one two fans um and then you
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can see what they mean this is their this is their interesting cooler design
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here so they've actually left it quite open around the bottom of the card so
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here's our PCI Express 3.0 16x slot and
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what that means is that some of the incidental air flow from these fans is going to cool not only the graphics card
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itself but also your motherboard below it now with some last generation
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products from both the AMD and the NVIDIA side a design like this wasn't
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really an option because they needed all the airf flow possible from these fans
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in order to keep the graphics card cool enough but the 7950 is actually
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significantly cooler running and more efficient than some of these last
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generation products due to the improved
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manufacturing process so we're able to take advantage of some of this air flow
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and use it to cool the rest of your system and ensure that not only does
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your graphics card run stable but so does your entire PC on the back you can
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see the other the uh the end of this aluminum shroud goes right here on the
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top this is a very nice touch check this out so not only you can see it's quite
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open you can see those fan blades in there see me spinning them so that same
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that same kind of uh thinking although I don't see how it's nearly as beneficial
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here but I guess what it does is it also provides less restriction for the fans
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overall so not only can you exhaust air out the back of the card uh not so much
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out this side but out here you can also
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exhaust all the air from your fans all around the card which means that they're
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not going to be very restricted but XFX has included instead of a plastic accent
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here they've included an aluminum accent it's got kind of a brushed finish to it
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just like the rest of the cooler that looks very very sharp it's branded with
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their ghost thermal technology bit here as well as their XFX r7950 thing that's
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going on here the good news about this entire cooler is that none of the
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numbers can fall off like I had happened during my 7970 unboxing
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video now let's have a look at the back of this card this is not a reference
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board so I was mistaken this is an aftermarket cooler on an aftermarket
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board it looks like they're probably using the reference design but this is
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clearly an XFX style matte black PCB so
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there you go guys um I stand corrected
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on that you can see all of the memory chips are installed on the other side of
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the PCB so that's 3 gigs of RAM over there our vrms are here our power is
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here you can see there are pin outs for a six pin and an 8 Pin but the card
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itself due to its lower power requirements compared to the 7970 only
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uses dual 6 pins we've got two Crossfire connectors so that is for well
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connecting to other cards to run in crossfire I've already talked about the
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PCI Express 3.0 so that is Gen 3 PCIe
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connector on the bottom but what I should also mention is that it is fully
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backwards compatible with a PCI Express Gen 2 or even PCI Express gen 1
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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
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be bottlenecking this graphics card with the interface itself however
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this graphics card is still by I mean when it's saturating a PCIe gen 1
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interface is still going to be more than any CPU that runs on that motherboard is
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going to be able to keep up with anyway so the bottleneck will still exist on
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the CPU side not with the PCI Express
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interface so now let's go ahead and have a look at what we've got for inputs and
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outputs oh I see why we have an HDMI to DVI adapter it's so that we can easily
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run dual DVI since most people running two displays are using that and then
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with four displays you can go either DVI HDMI mini DisplayPort mini DisplayPort
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or DVI DVI via adapter mini DisplayPort
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mini DisplayPort we've got a little XFX branded exhaust slot going on there and
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I think that pretty much covers it so what is the benefit of the 7950 well the
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7950 is cheaper than the 7970 we covered
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that already overclocks like a beast even though the reference stock clock
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speed is only 800 mahz these cards have been seen already going up around the
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1,000 MHz or 1 GHz Mark so what that
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means is we're looking at 20 to 25%
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overclocks on an Enthusiast level graphics card which hasn't been seen in
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a fair while so I guess not only did AMD
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achieve better thermal performance and better power consumption with their new
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manufacturing process but also better overclocking headro so thank you for
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checking out my unboxing and first look at the XFX 7950 Double D don't forget to
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