Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing is something that's actually fairly exciting this is the Radeon HD 7950 this is a bit of a step down from the 7970 but they haven't actually reduced the performance that much so today not only do I have a Radeon HD 7950 to unbox and take a bit of a look at but I have the particularly special one so this is the XFX double D and that is not to say that it goes here necessarily but rather to say that it is double dissipation so that means they've put um about an aftermarket cooler on what is otherwise still a reference 7950 so you can rest assured that you're getting the quality that goes along with that a reference board or whatever else but you are also getting two fans for removing heat from your card so what does XFX have to say about it let's go with that first and then we'll open up the card itself so it has three gigs of memory for max effect and resolutions I'm sure they need effects and resolutions but be out basically what that means is that if you're running even three monitors in Eyefinity mode you're going to have enough of a frame buffer in order to not suffer from a serious performance leg that results when the graphics memory fills up and you have to go to your hard drive which is slow or even system memory or anywhere else is slower than graphics memory next generation performance they are very correct about that even though this is not a top-of-the-range card it does perform as well or better than nvidias premium GTX 580 ghost thermal maximizes airflow for exceptional venting throughout the card that's interesting we'll have to have a look at that what else we got here multi monitor difference yeah okay so it does support high affinity it's up to four monitors unique dual fan design allows air to cool everything including including thermal including GPU heat sinks components in the PCB board so that I'll believe okay unless we got here five-star support register your product and get industry-leading five-star support yeah make sure you register okay Jen ultra bandwidth K pcie 3.0 yes it does have pcie 3.0 so we'll talk about that a little bit more after okay tessellation bullet physics engine resident textures okay these are probably kind of extreme examples but basically more better than before Hydra sells thermal solution interesting condensation wicks evaporation wicks okay so they're talking about basically what are they called again vapor chambers yep it's burial thermal perfect for overclocking okay cool let's get it opened up first we have a little brochure for their Pro Series power supplies other great XFX products including adapters hardware limited warranty let's have a look at okay so they want you to go and check it out on XFX course comm quick install guide driver CD install guide okay and there's the driver CD next we've got a crossfire bridge as well as an HDMI to DVI adapter that's an interesting one you don't see that included with video cards very often we've also got one of XFX is trademark door hangers I've actually got one in there in this room over here check it out this is an older one this is from backline XFX did Nvidia graphics cards but there's a no I've another one to go with it pretty cool these are handy because they also keep your serial number and all that cool information on the back of it so that means that you can not have to pull the card out of your system if you ever need to look anything up on the X festival XFX website or register it or whatever else so let's open up the double dissipation 7950 and have a look at it so these are two as he's 90 mill fans hold on a sec sorry so yes that is 292 92 milf Ann's over a huge Wow look at this oh this is interesting so this is what they mean by this over a huge heatsink hour so you can see the heat sink goes all the way from here down to here it's got a bit of a stepped appearance going on so that means it can benefit not only from the air that is blowing directly down onto the PCB but also some of that incidental airflow that comes from around the edge of the spinning fan so you can see they built up the heatsink in these areas in order to take advantage of that you can see we've got a sleeved connector here that provides power for 1-2 fans and then you can see what they mean this is their this is their interesting cooler design here so they've actually left it quite open around the bottom of the card so here's our PCI Express 3.0 16x slot and what that means is that some of the incidental airflow from these fans is going to cool not only the graphics card itself but also your motherboard below it now with some last generation products from both the AMD and the Nvidia side a design like this wasn't really an option because they needed all the airflow possible from these fans in order to keep the graphics card cool enough but the 7950 is actually significantly cooler running and more efficient than some of these last generation products due to the improved manufacturing process so we're able to take advantage of some of this airflow and use it to cool the rest of your system and ensure that not only does your graphics card run stable but so does your entire PC on the back you can see the other the the end of this aluminum shroud goes right here on the top this is a very nice touch check this out so not only you can see it's quite open you can see those fan blades in there see me spinning them so that same that same kind of thinking although I don't see how it's nearly as beneficial here but I guess what it does is it also provides less restriction for the fans overall so not only can you exhaust air out the back of the card not so much out this side but out here you can also exhaust all the air from your fans all around the card which means that they're not going to be very restricted but XFX has included instead of a plastic accent here they've included an aluminum accent it's got kind of a brushed finish to it just like the rest of the cooler that looks very very sharp it's branded with their ghost thermal technology bit here as well as their XF XR 7950 thing that's going on here the good news about this entire cooler is that none of the numbers can fall off like I had happened during my 7970 unboxing video now let's have a look at the back of this card this is not a reference board so I was mistaken this is an aftermarket cooler on an aftermarket board it looks like they're probably using the reference design but this is clearly an XFX style matte black PCB so there you go guys I stand corrected on that you can see all of the memory chips are installed on the other side of the PCB so that's three gigs of RAM over there our VRMs are here our power is here you can see there are pin outs for a six pin and an eight pin but the card itself due to its lower power requirements compared to the 7970 only uses dual six pins we've got two cross fire connectors so that is for well connecting to other cards to run in crossfire I've already talked about the PCI Express 3.0 so that is gen 3 PCIe connector on the bottom but what I should also mention is that it is fully backwards compatible with the PCI Express gen 2 or even PCI Express gen1 motherboard so don't worry about that although if you go all the way back to Gen 1 board you're probably going to be bottlenecking this graphics card with the interface itself however this graphics card is still but I mean when it's saturating a PCIe Gen 1 interface is still going to be more than any CPU that runs on that motherboard is going to be able to keep up with anyway so the bottleneck will still exist on the CPU side not with the PCI Express interface so now let's go ahead and have a look at what we've got for inputs and outputs all I see why we have an HDMI to DVI adapter it's so that we can easily run dual DVI since most people running two displays are using that and then with 4 displays you can go either DVI HDMI mini DisplayPort mini DisplayPort or DVI DVI via adapter mini DisplayPort mini DisplayPort we've got a little XFX branded exhaust slot going on there and I think that pretty much covers it so what is the benefit of the 7950 well the 79 is cheaper than the 7970 we've covered that already over clocks like a beast even though the reference stock clock speed is only 800 megahertz these cards have been seen already going up around the 1,000 megahertz or 1 gigahertz mark so what that means is we're looking at 20 to 25% over clocks on an enthusiast level graphics card it hasn't been seen in a fair a while so I guess not only did AMD achieve better thermal performance and better power consumption with their new manufacturing process but also better overclocking Headroom so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the XFX 7950 double D don't forget to subscribe for Linus tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos