AMD 7950 Review and Benchmarks

[The Joker]

So another monster of a card from AMD..They def have the winning recipe right now.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5476/a...7950-review/19

Final Words

When AMD launched the Radeon HD 7970 last month there was a great deal of speculation that the Radeon HD 7950 would be their direct GeForce GTX 580 competitor, and indeed this has proven to be the case. While the 7970 sails past the GTX 580 – and AMD has priced it based on that – the 7950 and the GTX 580 are trading blows on a game-by-game basis, similar to what we saw last year in comparing the GTX 500 series and the Radeon HD 6900 series. But when the 7950 wins it wins big, while the same cannot be said of the GTX 580; the only real weakness for the 7950 right now is Battlefield 3, and while that’s an important game it’s but one of several.

Ultimately it’s not a fair fight, not that AMD ever intended it to be one. Outside of a few corner cases the 7950 renders the GTX 580 irrelevant, and while it’s not quite as immense as what the 5850 did to the GTX 285 2 years ago the outcome is much the same. With the 7950 AMD can deliver performance similar to if not better than the GTX 580 while consuming significantly less power and enjoying all the temperature & noise benefits that provides, making it a very attractive card.

On that note the cooling situation makes the launch of the 7950 one of the more unusual high-end product launches in recent history. With high-end cards typically sticking to reference designs for the first phase of their lives the 7950 lineup is going to be much more varied than normal, not only in gaming performance due to factory overclocks but in cooling performance too. While we can speak in absolutes about the gaming performance of the 7950 there is no common thread on cooling performance – it needs to be evaluated on a per-product basis, so it will be important to do your research.

Meanwhile the $450 price tag is unfortunately not very aggressive on AMD’s part, but with their lead in rolling out their new lineup this is to be expected. Given its performance the 7950 needs only to be as cheap as the cheapest GTX 580 and that’s exactly what AMD has done. There will ultimately be a massive price shakeup at the high-end due to 28nm, but this looks like it won’t happen until AMD has some competition at 28nm.

Finally, what about our retail sample cards, the XFX R7950 Black Edition Double Dissipation and the Sapphire HD 7950 Overclock Edition? These two cards clearly embody the type of variety we’re going to see from AMD’s partners; they have fairly large factory overclocks and large open air coolers, and with these customizations AMD’s partners are hoping to set themselves apart from each other while justifying a higher MSRP in the process.

Overall the Sapphire HD 7950 Overclock Edition is the clear winner among the two cards. While I believe our specific sample is well above the average card due to its extremely low VID, in terms of design Sapphire has clearly done their homework and it shows with an excellent cooler that is ridiculously quiet and equally as cool. The factory overclock isn’t anything that shouldn’t be achievable on your own, but if you’re serious about overclocking the cooler alone would be enough to justify the extra $30.

On the other hand the XFX R7950 Black Edition Double Dissipation ends up being a bummer, particularly compared to its 7970 based sibling. For what an open air cooler can do it’s simply too hot and too loud; the numbers we’re seeing would be acceptable for a blower, but not for an open air cooler. The gaming performance is great thanks to its best in class factory overclock, but this isn’t enough to overlook the obvious cooling troubles.

Wrapping things up, so far we’ve looked at single card performance, but what about CrossFire? Later this week we’ll be looking at 7970 and 7950 CrossFire performance, and what the plethora of open air coolers means for 7950 users. So stay tuned.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7950/31.html

The Good
•Good performance increase vs. HD 6950
•Excellent energy efficiency
•Outstanding overclocking potential
•Native full-size HDMI & DisplayPort output
•Dual BIOS
•3 GB of memory with 384-bit bus
•Adds support for PCI-Express 3.0 and DirectX 11.1
•Support for multiple independent audio streams




The Bad
•Noisy in 3D
•Price could be lower
•CCC Overdrive limits too low



9.1

AMD's Radeon HD 7950 is finally released after what seemed like an eternity after the HD 7970 launch. The reference design of the card looks just like its older brother. Internally we see less shaders, reduced clock speeds, one power phase less and two six pin PCIe power connectors instead of 8+6 like on the HD 7970. As a result the HD 7950 delivers decent high-end performance, which is on par with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580. The HD 7950, like the GTX 580, is great for 1920x1200 gaming, even though we feel it lacks a little bit of extra power for the perfect 2560x1600 gaming experience.
In terms of power consumption we see outstanding results, thanks to AMD's power consumption reduction technologies and the TSMC 28 nm process. This puts the HD 7950 at the number one spot in performance per Watt. Great job here, AMD.
Unfortunately the AMD reference design cooler is still as noisy as the one on the HD 7970, which is quite surprising considering that the card produces so much less heat, that it could have easily been traded off for a quieter fan profile. We also tested the PowerColor HD 7950 PCS+ today which is a lot quieter and cooler, AMD should have chosen a better reference cooler.
Overclocking works just as great as on the HD 7970. Due to the lower base clock speed relative overclocking is even more spectacular. Our maximum clocks are 1085 MHz GPU and 1785 MHz memory - without any voltage or fan speed increases. As a result the card gains an impressive 30% in real life performance!
Price-wise the HD 7950 comes at $449, which feels quite expensive considering this is a next-gen part. Compared to the HD 6950 (some of which can be unlocked to HD 6970), AMD jacked up pricing by 40% with performance taken into account. However, when looking at this from the perspective of the $500 GTX 580, which delivers the same performance, HD 7950 pricing looks like a much better deal. So the price is both good and bad, depending on what you're relating it to.
I think in the long run, especially after NVIDIA releases their new cards, we will see large price drops and board designs with cost reduced components to keep pricing competitive.

Go check out the benchmarks guys...makes for some awesome reading.
Another win for AMD

[The Joker]

AMD 7950 Crossfire review and Benchmarks 2 + 3 way crossfire.

So this is where the cards really shine..beating any and everything and sitting pretty right behind its big brother.
Destroying cards costing a good $200 more without even breaking a sweat.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon...w-2-and-3way/1

Final Words & Conclusion
Our Crossfire experience was a mixed bag of results. When we tested the 7970 in 2-way Crossfire, we barely had any issues. With the 7950 that changed somewhat. You probably missed it in our test session, but Crysis 2 would not scale whatsoever, we had a weird freeze in Far Cry 2, Lost Planet 2 was rather unstable, Dirt 2 showed massive corruption (hence we left it out). So yeah, that's quite a bit to deal with.

Another title that ran into problems was Battlefield 3, 2-way Crossfire worked spotless, but with 3-way crossfire we could not even get into the main menu.

It's for reasons mentioned above that we always suggest you guys that IF you opt a multi-GPU solution, to go with 2 cards maximum. Here again we we like to say that very same thing.

AMD will need to place a strong focus on drivers as last year, if you have read up in our forums, AMD's Radeon team has been a step too slow with driver support. While there are monthly updates and hotfixes titles like Rage and Skyrim have been plagued by driver bugs, especially in Crossfire modes. It took AMD too long fix. When you drop 60 EUR on game you want to be able to play it on release day, period.

When we relate that to our test suite with CrossfireX in mind, AMD simply did not return with a homerun in this round. The flipside of the coin however is that most titles behaved well with 2-way Crossfire and performed beautifully really.

Once scaling does kick in (and you have a GPU dependant game title) that's where you'll get a smile on your face alright.

Crossfire Scaling
Obviously this topic is closely related towards the previous paragraph, but once Crossfire is properly supported, well it just doesn't disappoint. The games scale well with the new Tahiti GPU architecture. And depending on your monitor resolutions you'll see relative performance scaling go upwards with your monitor resolution. The modern GPU stringent titles scale anywhere from 1.6x towards a staggering 2x performance, and that's just impressive.

Going past 2 GPUs remains a bit of a dilemma. If your goal is to breach 3DMark records, then by all means go for it. But for the enthusiast gamer, two GPUs tops remains our recommendation.

Power and Heat
Much like the reference 7950 review has shown, the cooling is certainly sufficient enough for two cards inside a chassis and during gaming temperatures will stay at roughly 70~75 Degrees C. The IDLE noise levels are close to NIL really, and when stressed massively two cards will be audible, you will hear quite a bit of airflow. It however remains at acceptable levels.

With three cards you need to make sure you have a lot of cool air flowing into your chassis. Expect the warmest GPU to reach 80 Degrees C as you are bound to place the cards close together. Once you pass 75 degrees C the noise levels once again will increase as well. Keep that in mind if considering the multi-GPU road, at all times

We very much so remain impressed by the board the power consumption of the R7950 cards. At roughly 140~150 Watt per GPU you just can not complain.

With this Crossfire overview we also have been able to get glimpse into the future, the pending Radeon HD 7990 surely is looking tempting. Driver troubles aside, we did have a lot of fun testing in Crossfire mode.

Again we recommend two cards over three anytime. Unless you are into achieving the highest 3Dmark scores of course, and that's a hole lot of fun as well.

Go check through all the benchmarks guys...Will show you what a beast these cards really are.

[Isengard]

Pricing is still a bit silly so I wouldn't get one right away. I expect massive pricing competition when nVidia launches their new line-up and that will be the time to buy methinks.

[Vengeful_Bunny]

Yeah, sick card.
Way out of my price range for now, but who knows?
Worried about BF3 since that's my main game atm.

[The Joker]

Meh only 2 replies...where are the hardware fanatics??? Am I the only one lol

[OGBuzz]

Meh only 2 replies...where are the hardware fanatics??? Am I the only one lol

haha, this card looks great on paper and from reviews, im VERY keen on this card, im wondering what we can expect to pay in the coming months though, R4000? R5000?

[The Joker]

Well I see Landmark has it listed for 6k + which is fucking crazy...They seriously have a few nuts and bolts missing in their mind.
I know what they pay for the cards...I know what the resellers and suppliers pay for the cards and I can honestly say from the bottom of my heart they are screwing their own customers.

[Landmark Computers]

Well I see Landmark has it listed for 6k + which is fucking crazy...They seriously have a few nuts and bolts missing in their mind.
I know what they pay for the cards...I know what the resellers and suppliers pay for the cards and I can honestly say from the bottom of my heart they are screwing their own customers.

Joker

That was an error that we later rectified.
Price is R5416.04 including VAT.

We aren't out there to mess with our Customers.
It's clear that the internet is a very large playground for many online stores and anyone can simply do a quick search to compare prices. It would be very silly for us to try sell a R5K graphics card @ R6K, Newness Tax included or not. We are certainly not that closed-minded and always offer competitive prices across the board. If you have access to price-lists you'll very easily see that we mark-up on average 8-10%. This is well in-line with other online stores in SA.

Kind regards,
The Landmark Team

[The Joker]

Joker

That was an error that we later rectified.
Price is R5416.04 including VAT.

We aren't out there to mess with our Customers.
It's clear that the internet is a very large playground for many online stores and anyone can simply do a quick search to compare prices. It would be very silly for us to try sell a R5K graphics card @ R6K, Newness Tax included or not. We are certainly not that closed-minded and always offer competitive prices across the board. If you have access to price-lists you'll very easily see that we mark-up on average 8-10%. This is well in-line with other online stores in SA.

Kind regards,
The Landmark Team

Well thanx for clearing that up.
I buy the cards directly from suppliers and I import stuff as well, so I know what these go for.
The price it was advertised for was seriously...wow..omfg are you nuts crazy..lol

Btw I have actually bought from you guys in the past..which is why I found it shocking to see that price.

Should also add a small typo like that can cause serious issues, as you guys have seen.

[Landmark Computers]

Hi Joker

Yeah, we were also a little shocked at initial pricing that we were given but later the JHB supplier confirmed that the price was incorrect so we changed asap.

Glad it is sorted now and sorry for any confusion to you and the users of mygaming.

Have a great evening.