Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed okay so you may recall I recently compared the new Radio rx 560 head-to-head with in videos GeForce GTX 1050 in an epic 30 game battle overall performance was very competitive though the 1050 did come out just on top and it also used slightly less power and that made it my preferred option that said I've got a freezing monitor or you plan to get one in the near future the RX 560 would probably be the smarter choice anyway if you have $100 u.s. or about a hundred and seventy Australian to spend should you even consider one of these new entry-level graphics cards or should you up for something a little more worn in of course the advantage of buying new you get things such as a warranty and those certainly come in handy at times and you do get support for all the latest features things such as DirectX 12 for example but what if you could buy 2012 second-in-command Radeon HD 7950 which was $450 u.s. back in 2012 obviously no longer sells for nearly that much last month they were seen selling on eBay for about $70 u.s. or $100 Aussie of course pricing has gone up as is the case with all GPU at the moment thanks to miners I suppose that's good news for those of you who hold onto your old graphics card because you can now sell it for a handsome profit anyway before too long pricing will correct and in fact you might even be able to get a 7950 for a price previously unheard of and if that is the case should you consider the five-year-old GPU or just get a current generation entry-level GPU instead that's what I plan to find out in this video anyway enough about mining they'll no doubt be plenty of reading material in the comment section complaining about it so I don't need to pour on I've tested the Radeon HD 7950 in 8 games and provided some nice graphs for you guys to quickly compare the results to the rx 560 and gtx 1050 and 1050 Ti but before we get to that here is some gameplay footage of the 7950 playing popular eSports titles such as overwatch csgo and rocket League while watching the footage I'll rattle on a bit about the history of the 7950 and then we'll get to the graphs so how does the old HD 7950 compare to the new rx 560 well 7950 years built upon the first generation GCN architecture while the RX 560 is a 4th gen part it's pretty crazy to think but you could almost fit 3 rx 560 dies in the same space that a single 7950 die occupies and yet despite that the 560 only has around 30% fewer transistors having said all that though the 7950 does pack a massive 75% more cores and texture addressing units however the cause do operate at roughly a 60% greater frequency for the rx 560 still when it comes to the memory subsystem the 1750 has a massive advantage here thanks to a really beefy 384 bit wide memory bus enabling a bandwidth of 240 gigabytes per second that's more than twice that of the 560 I should also note that two years after its release the 7950 was rebranded as the Radeon r9 280 and sold for 250 dollars u.s. the core was slightly overclocked but essentially performance remain much the same so the numbers you're about to see will also reflect what the r9 280 is capable of anyway on paper at least the 7950 looks as though it will be able to take the current generation entry level parts the cleaners of course real-world gaming performance often tells a different story when it comes to comparing new and old hardware so let's go see how they stack up on our risin 5 1400 test system with 8 gigabytes of ddr4 2666 memory the Radeon HD 7950 gets off to a reasonable start beating out both the rx 560 and gtx 1050 and Mass Effect Andromeda at 1080p using the medium quality preset here we see an average of 58 FPS which is plenty for smooth gameplay so good result let's move on to see how battlefield one plays please note this game was tested using the ultra quality preset and I have to admit this is a little too taxing on performance ideally gamers will want to run with the high or medium quality settings as a result we do see the 7950 struggling here and despite the many calls and superior bandwidth it does fall behind the GTX 1050 and rx 560 so these results are unexpected given what we've seen so far testing with Resident Evil 7 the 7950 played very well spitting out 72 FPS on average making it not just fast in the RX 560 and gtx 1050 but also the 1050 Ti so a very solid result for the old 7950 here moving the dirt for I was quite surprised to see a minimum of 53 FPS for the 1750 as the game played very well of course 53 FPS is still very high for this kind of game but with such a massive disparity between the 1% minimum and average framerate you might expect noticeable stuttering now and then anyway the game played very well that said the 1750 was still slower than the rx 560 the numbers in Ferrara or more or less what we're expecting to see the 7950 edged ahead of the RX 564 the average framerate though the minimum was a little on the low side anyway both were a good bit slower than the GTX 1050 in this title for honor is a game that plays well on most PC hardware little praised again that plays exceptionally well even on low-end or dated hardware as we can see here the 7950 turned out an impressive 59 FPS on average and although that made it quite a bit slower than the GTX 1050 performance was still excellent performance was also excellent and Dawn of War 4 and here we see the 7950 taking out both the rx 560 and GT x 1050 graphics cards with an impressive 55 FPS in fact it wasn't much slower than the GTX 1050 Ti so a great result for the 5 year old GPU here the last game I'm going to look at is Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon wildlands and this is a seriously demanding title so I've been forced to use the lowest possible quality preset even with the low quality settings in place the 7950 was good for just 49 fps though the 39 FPS minimum was quite good still even so the 7950 doesn't look to be that well optimized for this title capping things off we have the power consumption figures I'm actually surprised with how well the 7950 does here obviously it's operating at a much lower clock speed when compared to the rx 560 and GTX 1050 but with significantly more cores on the 28 nanometer process the results aren't that bad total system consumption peaked at just 197 watts and that's only 15% more than the rx 560 the 7950 certainly isn't a power peak as I sort of expected it to be at least in relation to these current generation entry-level GPUs so it appears as though the old Radeon HD 7950 is actually very close to the rx 560 and GTX 1050 when it comes to modern gaming performance that said though the results were a bit mixed so what does an eight-game average look like let's go find out well there you have it overall the 1715 rx 560 do deliver a similar experience now of course as I just said the results will vary depending on the game I'd say it's a lack of driver optimization for some of the newer titles that's probably holding the 7950 back ever so slightly but given it is a five-year-old GPU now and it is based on the first-generation GCN architecture you can hardly blame AMD for not fully optimizing for this older GPU having said that though the performance was smooth and stability was excellent so given the GPUs advanced stage that was great to see if I came across a cheap 7950 I wouldn't hesitate this network for a budget build especially if I was playing games such as counter-strike or rocket League for example alright that's going to do it for this one if you liked the video please take a moment to help us out and hit the like button subscribe if you haven't already in roomba hit that notification bell if you'd like to be notified of our videos as they go live I'm your host Steve see again soon guys