AMD Radeon HD 7950 Graphics Cards Now Available
AMD Radeon HD 7950 Graphics Cards Now Available
Posted 01/31/2012 at 11:08am
| by Brad Chacos
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Maybe the Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards launched earlier this month wasn't quite your cup of tea. At $550, you should make damn sure your proverbial tea meets your tastes before you buy it. But that's the thing about graphics cards; like tea, they come in a variety of flavors. Today, AMD launched its second 28nm next-gen GPU, the Radeon HD 7950, another high-end offering -- but this one costs $100 less than its 7970 sibling.
Need a spec refresh? Here you go: the Radeon HD 7950 packs 800MHz core speeds, 3GB GDDR5 memory with a 1250MHz (5GHz effective) clock, 240GB/s memory bandwidth, 1792 stream processors, 112 texture units, Eyefinity and CrossFire support (duh), and a whole lot more, all of which you can find on the Radeon HD 7950 product page on AMD's website.
Of course, card manufacturers can put their own twist on things, as evidenced by taking a peek at the HD 7950 cards on offer over at Newegg. Sapphire, HIS, PowerColor, XFX, MSI and ASUS all have models for sale in prices ranging from $460 to $500, as does Gigabyte, whose $490 card is overclocked to 900MHz. Most of 'em are still in stock, too.
So, do any of you plan on picking one of these up? Which floats your personal boat more: the HD 7950 or the HD 7970?
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dgrmouse
January 31, 2012 at 4:15pm
AMD's new cards all fail pretty badly when you consider their price/performance ratio. They rolled out a brand new architecture on a brand new process and couldn't offer an improvement in price/performance over the last series. People complained loudly when they did it with Bulldozer, and I believe AMD is deserving of the same kind of censure here.
NineRaven
January 31, 2012 at 3:41pm
If I buying a new PC I would just go for the 6970 instead. This new card isnt powerful enough to justify the extra 100 dollars. AMD is seriously crippling PC gaming with their astronomically expensive graphics cards. Even if I had the money to afford one of these I would just go for the 6900 instead and save myself a couple hundred dollars while not losing out on much power.
bpstone
January 31, 2012 at 5:24pm
The new architecture does look promising. The AMD Radeon 7970 (or 7950) offloading can better reduce CPU bottle-neck. The extra memory that it utilizes will come in handy for those running more than one or two high resolution monitors. It comes down to what you are planning to do with your GPU/s. If you are gaming on a single solid monitor, then buying an AMD Radeon 6950 should suffice. When games get more intense, run two more in tri-Crossfire. Quad is not recommended. Kind of like driving a Koenigsegg CCXR twenty miles to work every day going the speed limit. That would be cool, but way overkill for what it is being used for. ;)
bpstone
January 31, 2012 at 1:50pm
The AMD Radeon 7970 GPU will probably be my choice to go inside my regular rig. I do not think Nvidia's Kepler will be coming out till later this quarter after reading some of the latest rumors.
Morete
January 31, 2012 at 12:05pm
From a tech report on the web....
"a hot-clocked 7950 card performs very much like a stock-clocked 7970 but costs substantially less. I suppose those folks who want the very best will pay the premium for an up-clocked version of the 7970 like XFX's Black Edition, which really is the finest video card that's ever been tested, with a much quieter cooling solution than AMD's reference design. Still, with all of the overclocking headroom in the 7950, paying more for the 7970 seems... unnecessary."
I plan on getting the higher clocked 7950 and save some money. I never run more than one monitor anyway.
blkpanthr
January 31, 2012 at 1:57pm
A factory OCd 7950 WILL NOT give you 7970 performance
you will need to do that your self, at your own risk.
The AIB parners have added sufficient cooling options to allow this, but you are on your own if you create a door-stop while doing so.
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