Gadgetory

better late than never that's what I say and I hope you guys agree this will be my own or my knife is there it is this will be my unboxing and first look at the Radeon HD 7950 from sapphire now there's something a little bit special about this particular HD 7950 from sapphire and that is that in addition to being a non reference design so that is to say it comes on a non reference PCB which we've come to expect from 79 50s it also has a non-reference cooler and it is overclocked so it's a three gig card has support for their tricks tweak and overclock utility for sapphire graphics cards it comes with an HDMI cable okay so this is all very interesting there's a lot of stuff here but we're going to cover most of this when we get a little bit further in so much like the Radeon HD here we go 79 70 so this is an OEM card with the completely um yeah dollas anything reference cooler reference PCB so unlike our similarly to the 7970 it uses the Tahiti core so that is a 28 nanometer GPU and the difference is that it has slightly fewer functional units than the 7970 and in its default configuration anyway it is clocked a little bit lower both of these graphics cards have three gigs of memory and they're using the latest 28 nanometer manufacturing process in order to achieve outstanding performance with really what is was previously thought to be completely unbelievable power consumption not unbelievable in the bad way unbelievable the good way we're not talking like you know GTX 480 here we're talking like seems like it could be like a 2600 Pro in terms of the power consumption at idle but it is actually a full-fledged gaming card so inside the box we find the driver installation disk we find a quick installation guide we find a product registration card probably a good idea to use that okay crossfire bridge wot's Wow all the stuff comes with lots of stuff so we've got to 8-pin - oh no we have them - molex - PCIe 6 pin adapters there's the 1 point 8 meter HDMI cable that they claimed was included and I have now validated and is actually included we also get a mini DisplayPort to display for an adapter a HDMI to DVI adapter although it should be noted that this will only work for single-link DVI so that is up to 1920 by 1200 at 60 Hertz because you are still relying on the HDMI port which is only single link we've also got a DVI to VGA adapter so we can go ahead and throw all of these back in here and let's have a look at the card itself so yes I have all these other cards over here and I'm definitely I'm definitely getting to that that's going to be more of a more of a size comparison thing than anything else there we go wow that's actually a gorgeous looking part so here we have in the Sapphire HD 7950 it has dual 92 millimeter cooling fans on a very very robust looking cooler so check this out we've got dual thick heat pipes and then triple thinner heat pipes all of them are taking heat away from the GPU core itself but you can actually see right there from the GPU core itself as far away as possible to the aluminum fins that are cooling it so what you'll notice is that they use the thicker heat pipes for the greater distances in order to make sure that we're carrying heat effectively away even over here so that this fan actually has heat to carry away from the metal in order to cool the GPU itself it uses a very very open design so you can see as I turn it around the fans airflow is not impeded pretty much in any way by a shroud or any other characteristics of the cooler itself so it's got a plastic shroud right here and then it's see that free air flow coming from the fans down out around the GPU what this means is a couple of things so one it means that heat is being expelled into your case so if you don't have a decent case that you know has intake fans and exhaust fans if you're using like a crummy sort of mini Tower or something like that you might not prefer a card like this you might prefer one that sticks with a more reference design which is an external exhaust blower fan like that however if you do have a decent case these are usually much more effective than those referenced coolers at removing heat from the GPU the memory in the vrm and at the cost that you do expel some of the heat into your case so yeah something to consider what are you actually speaking of erm what are we doing for vrm cooling oh this is kind of smart check this up so they've got the the usual sort of GPU cooling thing going on here but then they've also added a heat spreader so you see this black piece right here that goes pretty much all the way around and wraps up here around the top so that's covering up all the memory modules all three gigs of memory are actually located you can see the positions of them are located on this side of the PCB some of the other vrm components are not covered by a heatsink but they do have direct airflow from a fan coming down on them from the top so I've right I was saying advantages and drawbacks of these coolers right so they tend to be cooler and quieter than reference coolers but the drawback is that they do exhaust the heat into your case so just make sure you got a decent case or like me no case that is another solution okay so what other characteristics here so you saw the two included molex to 6-pin pci ii adapters that's because this card requires two PCI Express six pen adapters you can see on it actually this is kind of interesting yeah so this is a completely non reference card okay you can see on it that there was room for an eight pin adapter here but they did not deem that to be necessary remember the tahiti pro so that's the 7950 does not require as much power as the 7970 in terms of output options these are very similar to what we're used to seeing on these cards it does support up to four display I finna T so that is DVI HDMI and two mini display ports right here and on the back I guess not much else to say about it now why do I have all these cards here right let's get to that this is an overclocked card so what I want to find out because I've never actually taken a look at a not overclocked actually this is more like this yeah there we go I've never actually taken a look at a non overclocked 7950 so one of the things I tried to do tonight was flash my 7970 reference card with a 7950 bios to see if i could actually turn off some of the shaders so that i could compare this against like a fully referenced 7950 but i'm not able to do that unfortunately it just turns down the clock speed it doesn't turn down the shaders so what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be taking this overclocked version of the card and I'm going to see how it compares against a itself at stock clock speed so I'll just turn dial them back to reference clocks using the included overclocking utility which can also be used for under clocking and then I also want to compare it against a wide variety of other cards so here I have a 69.95 90 I have a 79 70 GTX 580 I have the 79 50 which will be OC and not OC but it'll be the same card I'm just going to change the clock speeds I have a GTX 570 and I have a 69 70 / 69 50 so I use the bios switch in order to switch this card between those two different biases because this one can be locked and unlocked so stay tuned on Linus tech tips from a closer look at this card we're also going to profile the overall noise and heat characteristics of it and thank you for checking out my unboxing don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings reviews and other computer