Gadgetory

today's video is going to be about the Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 and I guess the 7950 in general although I'll be testing it a couple of different ways so first of all a quick overview of the card it's a 7950 which means that aside from the fact that it's got a custom PCB okay it's got a custom shroud with custom dual 92 millimeter fan cooling big old fat heat pipes for also for cooling right there big fin array um heat spreader for all the memory and vrm and all that good stuff you can see that down here in the black piece it's got up to four displays out with DVI HDMI and dual mini display ports it is a PCI Express 3.0 card two PCIe power other than that it is a completely normal 7950 except this is an overclocked edition so this is an overclocked card so I'm going to be testing it two ways I'm going to test it in its default config and then I'm going to manually dial it down to regular 7950 to see how much performance we're getting by buying this overclocked card versus a different one in terms of the competition we've got quite a few things because this is a next-generation card it's an overclocked card I'm going to be comparing it against not only things that are somewhat fair like the GTX 571 580 which are in sort of similar price bans and they're similar types of products but also the GTX 590 which is a dual GPU card the HD 6970 as well as 6950 with the dual BIOS switch on this particular card I can test it either way although it is a 69 70 I just hit the switch up to position two and I can test it as a 69 50 I'm also comparing it to its big brother the 7970 although that is a 100% vanilla card so we're going to see how this overclocked Edition compares not only to the 7970 but also to what it itself would be if it wasn't overclocked before we get to benchmarking results I want to walk you guys through the card a little bit so here it is on my test bench I actually haven't seen the performance numbers of this particular card yet but I want to start with another number that's very interesting so due to the 28 a meter manufacturing process and some clever engineering from AMD this system idles at 86 watts from the wall unfreaking believable the card is near silent so even over my course I reach 70 and Noctua fans you can probably only start to pick up these fans at idle at about this far away whoops at probably about 3 or 4 inches away so that's that's very cool it makes the system very quiet because you can see the courser fan also doesn't spin when the power consumption is very low bear in mind with that 86 watts at the wall this is an overclock to 4 gigahertz core i7 2600 no Intel power saving features enabled on it so it's at 4 gigahertz right now simply astounding oh oh yeah finally idle temperatures so we're also going to log the temperatures during our benchmark and find out how hot it gets during a gaming load so at default 7950 clocks that's where we took these power measurements and temperature readings we are peaking at 55 degrees and I'm going to have to fire up a game again in order to check the power because I forgot with load power consumption just north of 200 watts so that means with this 80 plus gold power supply which check it out the fan isn't even spinning in a game scenario we're actually only powering giving the system about 200 watts of power with about 220 watts being pulled from the wall with the carnet it's 900 megahertz default overclocked speed we were only one degree higher at idle and just a touch higher in terms of power consumption at the wall it hovers around 90 degrees give or take just idling at the desktop so now let's fire it up and see what kind of performance numbers we can get out of it power consumption again in the witcher 2 seems to be pretty much identical and the stems the reason because i haven't actually changed any voltage settings to 2-under volt it and then to re over bolt it back to its default speed of 900 megahertz so let's have a look at our maximum temperature which is 56 so we managed to get one degree toast here there's a 56 there somewhere and it's is very very quiet I also noticed that this particular card exhibits significantly less coil whines sorry about the focus there guys then most of the AMD reference cards that I have encountered whether it's that one that one or that one so that was a huge positive surprise for me so I'm going to go ahead and compile the results and we're oh I showed you power ok I showed you power consumption I showed you load temps at the overclock speed so let's have a look at the performance I used Crysis 2 The Witcher as well as battlefield 3 so if you guys really care to analyze this then you can go ahead and freeze the frame here and you can see all of the data including min Max and average for the three games that we're testing and all the cards I just want to clarify one thing this is the 7970 this is the 7970 with a 7950 bios on it because i wanted to see how closely it would perform to a 7950 at stock speed with the with the with the BIOS flash to 7950 because I was really hoping I'd be able to do the same thing that I do with my 6970 where I can use it as a 69 70 or 69 50 but it looks like the 70 900 series doesn't disable the functional units if you flash it with a different bios so that's what that weird cryptic b2 result is I have the 7950 OC - the sapphire Oh seed card and then I turned it down to stock 7950 speed so we could get those results as well so other than that it should be fairly self-explanatory one other thing that's going to stand out to you guys is that in battlefield 3 the 6990 didn't seem to be performing right although i just i included it anyway because honestly it's been my experience with the 6990 overall hence it being shelved at the moment over there literally shelved um that it's just a bear to work with it's not very consistent so GTX 590 is the big winner with 7970 outperforming everything else in spite of it being a single GPU card 7950 OC does perform a little bit better although if we go back to the min max average you can see that the overclocked minimum is significantly better than the stock minimum so it does seem to be helping there you go there's those results average FPS then we got Crysis - so Crysis 2 the two dual GPU cards are pretty much neck-and-neck sorry I didn't add the data labels there you go oh and I didn't change the formatting here whatever you guys you guys are cool you were waiting hold on there we go fix it those are legible so the dual GPU cards lead the way the 7970 um comes in second with the GTX 580 exactly tied with the 7950 OC making the 7950 OC a significantly better value and this one also we see a fairly different performance level from the overclocked card versus the stock card something to be noted here is that these dual GPU cards neither of them scale particularly well which means we're probably running into a CPU bound scenario around 130 FPS on this game finally the which are two very very GPU bound so you can see the dual GPU cards do pull away the 7970 performs at the top of the single GPUs with the 7950 coming in just behind it so looking at the data labels there and we're gonna go and yeah yeah yeah move those decimals so you guys don't have to look at completely illegible numbers SEC fixed okay and then the Nvidia cards really fall down at the bottom of the heap of this one with the last generation AMD card so this game really shows the power of the 7950 with the OC card coming in somewhere between a 7950 stock card and a 79 70 which is significantly more expensive so there you have it 28 nanometer architecture delivers awesome power consumption great performance the dual BIOS card supporting Eyefinity with up to 4 displays the duel fans run cool and quiet I'm actually really impressed with the cooler on this particular card so thank you for checking out this performance review and overview of the Sapphire 7950 OC don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more 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