XFX R7950 Black Edition Double Dissipation Graphics Card – Awesome Overclocker. The Price?

HEXUS has reviewed the new XFX R7950 Black Edition Double Dissipation Graphics card. We'll leave the fine details of this card to HEXUS's excellent review, but it's worth saying something about its straight line performance, the motherboard and the non-reference cooler that's been attached to it.

A standard card comes with the familiar red AMD cooler and clocks in at 800MHz for the GPU and 5GHz (DDR) for the memory. This card however, is clocked at 900MHz for the GPU (up 12.5%) and 5.5GHz (up 11%)  for the memory. This isn't the end of the story though.

The motherboard for this card is similar to the reference one, although not identical, being slightly shorter than the 11 inches length of the reference model, with the cooler wrapping around the end of it. The cooler uses twin fans and has an open design, letting air circulate all around the card, rather than using the wind tunnel out the back approach. While this is intended to cool the card more efficiently, it does mean that the heat is dumped inside the case, so efficient case cooling, or an open case are important to prevent overall overheating of the computer.

HEXUS managed to get it up to a huge 1160Mhz for the GPU and 6060MHz for the memory. Rounding to the nearest percentage point, these figures represent a massive 45% increase for the GPU over a reference HD 7950 and 29% over the stock XFX card. Similarly, for the memory, these figures represent a 21% increase over the reference design and 10% over the stock XFX card. Huge increases and the kind of thing enthusiasts have been waiting for. Here are the clock speeds as read out by GPU-Z v0.5.8. Note that the base memory clock speed of 1515MHz needs to be multiplied by 4 to give the true data rate of the memory.



And now on to the frame rate performance. Check out the comparison below using Aliens v Predator:



Comparing the 1080p results, which are at the resolution that most gamers are likely to play at, we see an improvement of 11% compared to a reference HD 7950 for a stock XFX card. Overclock it to 1160/6060 and the improvement jumps to a massive 32% over a reference HD 7950! This performance is enough to handily beat a stock HD 7970 hands down, by 12% to be precise. Not only that, but it equals the twin GPU GTX 590 from NVIDIA. In fact, overclocked, this card is bested only by the HD 6990. This performance level is nothing short of superb and should whet the apetite of any enthusiast PC gamer.

Of course results like these always come with some caveats. Namely, that the card you get might not overclock to these levels. It may overclock even further if you're lucky, although we expect it to not be much further.

But of course, the real kicker is the price: this overclockability is certainly not for free: the cheapest HD 7950s come in at around £350 (a great price, giving the GTX 580 a sound kicking) while this card is £65 more at £415, just £20-£25 cheaper than the cheapest HD 7970 which doesn't have the crippled GPU. This makes the XFX card around 19% more expensive than a reference one. Therefore, as usual, the decision for what to get isn't clear cut and boils down to what one can afford and how interested they are in overclocking it. Note that the noise performance is about the same as a reference HD 7950, according to HEXUS's measurements and that this result can vary a bit between reviewers.

HEXUS also has an interesting comparison between the HD 7950 & HD 7970 at the same clock speeds. So, what's the performance difference? 5%. That's right, next to nothing and a difference small enough that the reviewer couldn't feel much of a tangible improvement in real-world use. This was achieved by simply upping the clock speeds, no voltage tweaking required. The difference can be made to disappear altogether with a bit more overclocking too, of course. Get the HD 7950 and save a ton of cash. If it eventually turns out to be unlockable to a full HD 7970 with a BIOS flash or hardware mod, then so much the better.



It's been said that the launch of the HD 7950 was delayed by a few weeks to help ensure adequate stock levels on launch day. The cynic in me says that it was delayed in order to boost sales of the expensive HD 7970, which would undoubtedly drop once the performance difference was known. Yes, companes release these products to make money, so this tactic is perfectly reasonable.

It's clear that with this generation of cards, AMD has done 'a bit of an Intel' and produced processors which are capable of speeds far in excess of what they are officially rated at, effectively selling you an underclocked card, leaving the enthusiast to get the most out of it. Sounds like a good strategy and good value to me. The HD 7000 range of cards are a winner. The XFX product page is here.

I'd be interested in your take on this in the comments.