AMD Radeon HD 7950

Posted by: Alexandru Gheorghe In: Tested products

This model is based on the very same architecture as another AMD HD 7000 graphics card, namely, the HD 7970 (Graphics Core Next/Southern Islands architecture). This DirectX 11.1 card also has a shrunken down Cayman GPU (from 40nm, down to 28nm); though that doesn’t mean a smaller number of transistors, as AMD threw 4.3 billion of those into theTahiticore.

Even so, this is a smaller version of the Tahiti XT boasted by the HD 7970, this card’s Tahiti Pro coming with just 28 of the Compute Units that form the latest vector processor used by AMD for its cards. Meaning this model boasts just 1.792 Radeon Core as opposed to the 2.048 offered by the Tahiti XT core.

The card offers a sizeable 3GB of DDR5 frame butter on a 384 bit interface, and everything while still on PCIe 3.0 tech. The HD 7950 comes with a stock clock setting of 800MHz, which is a bit limited when compared to the HD 7970’s 925MHz.

amd radeon hd 7950

Performance

All in all, performance is what really counts for a graphics card, and the HD 7950 does very well in that department. At the stock clock setting, it’s a bit difficult for this card to be on par with the HD 7970’s performance, offering about 10% or, occasionally even 20% lower performances.

However, things change once you notice the HD 7950’s overclock potential, which will make up some of the differences between the two cards. Naturally, not every Tahiti Pro GPU is going to be able to take this amount of overclocking, but chances are, you’ll be able to improve those clock speeds up to 1GHz, maybe even more.

In this case, making use of AMD’s Overdrive software, we got as far as 1.100 MHz on the card’s core and 1.575 MHz on it’s memory, which was a considerable difference when compared to the stock speeds. And when you think that the HD 7950 is somewhat less expensive than the HD 7970, it makes it even more appealing.

This model is really an excellent card, and it even surpasses rivaling models such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 580, and it does it for a significantly less amount of money. And that’s just with out of the box clock speeds, but when you begin overclocking, the difference in performance between the two cards becomes even more noticeable.

Pros

The HD 7950’s stock performance is definitely excellent, as we’ve seen during our tests, however, what really shines here is the amount of potential for overclocking provided by the card’s Tahiti Pro core. Another thing that really stands out is the ZeroCore Power technology, which, even if you won’t see how it actually functions, it’ll work behind the scenes offering lower power consumption.

Cons

About the single thing we weren’t too fond of about this graphics card is that the clockspeed has been set a bit too low. But you’ll be pleased to know that AMD didn’t lock down the card’s overclocking possibilities.