Radeon HD 7950 SA pricing emerges

AMD yesterday officially released the second in command of its newly launched HD 7900 range, the HD 7950.

The card is based on the Tahiti Pro GPU and is fabricated using AMD’s new 28nm GCN architecture. Early reviews from the likes of Anandtech, Techpowerup, Neoseaker and others have found consensus, agreeing that the card is a great offering which essentially renders Nvidia’s monster GTX 580 obsolete and uncompetitive.

We will have our own review up very soon, so keep an eye out for that.

In terms of specs, the card boasts 1792 stream processors, 112 TMUs and 32 ROPS. Where the top of the range HD 7970 has 32 GCN compute units, the HD 7950 has 28. It comes standard with 3GB of GDDR5 memory, backed up by a juicy 384-bit memory interface. The reference card’s GPU is clocked at 800MHz and the memory comes in at a cool 1250MHz.

The slightly lower specs mean that the card draws a little less power than the HD 7970, and it therefore only requires two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors, instead of a 6-pin and an 8-pin connector.

AMD Radeon HD 7950

Landmarkpc.co.za was the first local retailer to upload the card onto its online storefront yesterday afternoon, offering the Asus variant for R5615 and the Sapphire card forR5416.05.

“We see the new AMD HD7950 cards coming in initially at around the R5600.00 – R6200.00 mark based on a Rand/Dollar rate of R8/1$,” said Landmark’s Andrew van der Nest.

“The South African “Newness Tax” will have a strong bearing on price initially but as more manufacturers enter the market we should see prices settle down to around the R5000 – R5400 mark.”

Evetech.co.za has listed the PowerColour version of the card for R5,299, and is already offering pre-built gaming PCs based around the HD 7950.

The card goes for $449 (R3592) in the US, so at the moment we are seeing a rather significant markup of around 50% and up.

Here’s hoping that as stock increases and more retailers and brands offer the card in SA we will see prices dip to below R5,000 per card.