HIS Radeon HD 7950 review - Introduction

A couple of weeks ago AMD launched the first series 7000 graphics cards based on the Tahiti XT GPU, the Radeon HD 7970. It was received positively in the market, a product that competes well with the GeForce GTX 580.

It is time for the second product based of the series 7900 though, the Radeon HD 7950 launches today. Introduced in a 400 / 450 USD price tag bracket the product will compete with the GeForce GTX 570 (which costs 350 EUR these days). Now the R7950 will actually be a decent notch better than the GTX 570 as the overall performance is closer to a GTX 580 rather than that 570, which we'll show you.

AMD took the Tahiti XT GPU sliced away some shader units, clocked it a notch slower and planted it onto a new PCB lined up with a new cooler. Overall the R7950  will not disappoint, good performance, impressive power consumption and great heat and noise levels.

Will a 400 EUR pricetag however justify this product ? We are asking this out and in the open as NVIDIA is getting ready to launch Kepler (architecture codename) based products, their new architecture promises to bring in a good amount of performance and that rumor alone haunts the 7900 series quite a bit even while it's unreleased (to date).

So welcome to our Radeon HD 7950 review, a product offering very good game performance, a great feature set and a frame buffer that will pop your eyes out as this card has 3 GB of it.

With the GPU developed under codename "Tahiti PRO" let's have a look at this Southern Island family member. Next page where we'll startup the technology overview first.

The product reviewed today comes from HIS, but is 100% the reference product (aside from the stickers and a blue PCB).