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AMD Radeon HD 7950 review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £350
inc VAT

Hugely fast and reasonable value compared to the HD 7970 - it's a Best Buy high-end card

The Radeon HD 7950, codenamed Tahiti Pro, is the second card we’ve seen in AMD’s new Southern Islands range of graphics cards, and is a step down from the Radeon HD 7970, codenamed Tahiti XT.

Radeon HD 7950

The HD 7950 is 12mm shorter than the HD 7970 and has the same outputs on the rear panel: DVI, HDMI and twin DisplayPort sockets. Depending on the board manufacturer, the card should come with an HDMI-to-DVI adaptor and an active Mini DisplayPort-to-DVI adaptor, so even if you don’t have a DisplayPort monitor you can use three monitors in Eyefinity mode. You can also buy active DisplayPort adaptors for £18 from www.lambda-tek.com.

The HD 7950 has the same 3GB of GDDR5 RAM and 384-bit memory bus as the HD 7970, but the RAM is clocked at 1.25GHz instead of 1.38GHz. There are some significant changes to the core: the cheaper card’s GPU runs at 800MHz instead of 925MHz, and it has 1,792 instead of 2,048 stream processors. The lower power also means you only need a power supply with two 6-pin PCI Express plugs rather than one 6-pin and one 8-pin plug.

Radeon HD 7950 ports

In our Dirt 3 test, which we run at 1,920 x 1,080, Ultra detail and with 4x anti-aliasing, the HD 7950 managed 73.9fps, compared to the HD 7970’s 88fps. When running Dirt 3 in Eyefinity mode at 5,760 x 1,080, again with Ultra detail and 4x anti-aliasing, we saw a smooth 34.2fps, compared to 41.5fps from the more expensive card. In Dirt 3, the HD 7950 has around 84 per cent of the performance of the HD 7970 for 75 per cent of the price.

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Basic Specifications

Price £350
Rating *****
Details www.amd.com
Award Best Buy
Interface PCI Express x16
Crossfire/SLI CrossFire
Slots taken up 2
Brand AMD
Graphics Processor AMD Radeon HD 7950
Memory 3GB GDDR5
Memory interface 384-bit
GPU clock speed 800MHz
Memory speed 1.25GHz
Card length 265mm

Features

Architecture 1,792 stream processors
Anti aliasing 8x
Anisotropic filtering 16x

Connectors

DVI outputs 1
VGA outputs 0
S-video output no
S-Video input no
Composite outputs no
Composite inputs no
Component outputs no
HDMI outputs 1
Power leads required 2x 6-pin PCI Express

Extras

Accessories HDMI to DVI, active Mini DisplayPort to DVI adaptors
Software included none

Buying Information

Warranty one year RTB
Price £350
Supplier http://www.aria.co.uk
Details www.amd.com

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