AMD Radeon HD 7950 Review Feat. Sapphire & XFX: Sewing Up The High-End Market
by Ryan Smith on January 31, 2012 9:02 AM ESTFinal Words
When AMD launched the Radeon HD 7970 last month there was a great deal of speculation that the Radeon HD 7950 would be their direct GeForce GTX 580 competitor, and indeed this has proven to be the case. While the 7970 sails past the GTX 580—and AMD has priced it based on that—the 7950 and the GTX 580 are trading blows on a game-by-game basis, similar to what we saw last year in comparing the GTX 500 series and the Radeon HD 6900 series. But when the 7950 wins it wins big, while the same cannot be said of the GTX 580; the only real weakness for the 7950 right now is Battlefield 3, and while that’s an important game it’s but one of several.
Ultimately it’s not a fair fight, not that AMD ever intended it to be one. Outside of a few corner cases the 7950 renders the GTX 580 irrelevant, and while it’s not quite as immense as what the 5850 did to the GTX 285 2 years ago the outcome is much the same. With the 7950 AMD can deliver performance similar to if not better than the GTX 580 while consuming significantly less power and enjoying all the temperature & noise benefits that provides, making it a very attractive card.
On that note the cooling situation makes the launch of the 7950 one of the more unusual high-end product launches in recent history. With high-end cards typically sticking to reference designs for the first phase of their lives the 7950 lineup is going to be much more varied than normal, not only in gaming performance due to factory overclocks but in cooling performance too. While we can speak in absolutes about the gaming performance of the 7950 there is no common thread on cooling performance—it needs to be evaluated on a per-product basis, so it will be important to do your research.
Meanwhile the $450 price tag is unfortunately not very aggressive on AMD’s part, but with their lead in rolling out their new lineup this is to be expected. Given its performance the 7950 only needs to be as cheap as the cheapest GTX 580 and that’s exactly what AMD has done. There will ultimately be a massive price shakeup at the high-end due to 28nm, but this looks like it won’t happen until AMD has some competition at 28nm or 7900 sales slow down significantly.
Finally, what about our retail sample cards, the XFX R7950 Black Edition Double Dissipation and the Sapphire HD 7950 Overclock Edition? These two cards clearly embody the type of variety we’re going to see from AMD’s partners; they have fairly large factory overclocks and large open air coolers, and with these customizations AMD’s partners are hoping to set themselves apart from each other while justifying a higher MSRP in the process.
Overall the Sapphire HD 7950 Overclock Edition is the clear winner among the two cards. While I believe our specific sample is well above the average card due to its extremely low VID, in terms of design Sapphire has clearly done their homework and it shows with an excellent cooler that is ridiculously quiet and equally as cool. The factory overclock isn’t anything that shouldn’t be achievable on your own, but if you’re serious about overclocking the cooler alone would be enough to justify the extra $30.
On the other hand the XFX R7950 Black Edition Double Dissipation ends up being a bummer, particularly compared to its 7970 based sibling. For what an open air cooler can do it’s simply too hot and too loud; the numbers we’re seeing would be acceptable for a blower, but not for an open air cooler. The gaming performance is great thanks to its best in class factory overclock, but this isn’t enough to overlook the obvious cooling troubles.
Wrapping things up, so far we’ve looked at single card performance, but what about CrossFire? Later this week we’ll be looking at 7970 and 7950 CrossFire performance, and what the plethora of open air coolers means for 7950 users. So stay tuned.
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nissangtr786 - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 - link
At the end of the day the 7970 and 7950 are great cards. They are like going from a 65nm pentium 4 to a 45nm core 2 duo in terms of performance per watt. Yes AMD may have not cranked the power consumption like amd do but performance per watt or gflops per watt it is basically double or even better then the last generation 40nm cards.Imagine 10000 40nm gtx 580 running in the world or 10000 7950 running in the world. Saving 160w more each person with similar person. 160w is a lot of power enough to run nearly an m17x r3 with 6970m.
160w multiplied by 10000 people = 1600000 watt difference for same performance of a gtx 580 and 7950. Thats 1.6m watts in simple terms more to game. If process and architecture changes of cpus and graphics cards didn't happen we would still have pentium 4's running at 3.8ghz with 6800 utras taking nearly as much power to run as an i7 3960x and 7970. Also idle watts usage go down every die shrink.
JNo - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
I'm surprised you didn't give the Sapphire a Gold Editor's choice award.It is pretty much awesome in every respect and I don't see any drawbacks.
No I don't work for Sapphire but this is the card I'd buy tomorrow (if I really needed it/had more money!)
Finally - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
Sapphire did do their homework. I find it astonishing that they were the only ones to consider undervolting, while also overclocking their product. Hats off!chizow - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
No, Tahiti is competing with the expectations of a new generation of hardware, expectations they clearly failed to meet. You don't ask for flagship prices when all you bring to the table is refresh performance of 14 month old last-gen parts. If you don't think so, but hey np, I have a copy of Madden 2010 you can buy for $60.How are my expectations too high? More like your expectations are too low if you were impressed with Tahiti. 15-25% faster than the last-gen flagship? Is that a joke? Once again, next-gen expectations commanding flagship prices should be AT LEAST 50% before anyone considers buying. Y'know, the same speed bump that "clusterfk" Fermi was over the last-gen parts...... Once again low expectations of AMD fans just used to being mediocre I suppose....
And to disprove your nonsense again with historical fact, Nvidia did have the fastest card in 2010 with GTX 480, but instead of raising the prices, they kept it the same with the GTX 580. They've done this in the past as well with the GTX 280 > GTX 285. They don't raise prices on refreshes, they also don't raise prices on flagships on new generations because they learned their lesson with GTX 280 after the original pricing fiasco.
chizow - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
Wrong again.The rebates were funded by Nvidia for price protected "exclusive" partners in NA and EU markets. At the time, that was EVGA, BFG and XFX.
The partners only sent out the rebate because they received the bulk of payment after shipping to retailers, but only with Nvidia's green light. Nvidia also directly funded/reimbursed or promised more inventory using the credited difference for any existing stock in the channel when they officially dropped the price of the GTX 280 from $650 to $500 and the GTX 260 from $450 to $350. Prices on the top two cards have stayed virtually the same since.
But yes, AMD is setting themselves up for a similar fall. If they priced the 7970 the same as the previous flagships, $500. No one would care that much. If they priced the 7950 the same as their previous 2nd tier, $380-400. No one would care that much.
But they got greedy. For what? 15-25% improvement on a new architecture, full node, and 14 months? History is due to repeat itself, and not in AMD's favor. At least in Nvidia's case, the GTX 280 actually warranted its pricetag relative to last-gen parts. You can't even say that about the 7970.
chizow - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
Well if a $300 card is priced where it should be and performs the same as AMD's $450 card something will certainly have to budge.Unless Nvidia decides to just refresh their old parts on 28nm and prices everything the same for a 5-10% increase in performance.
In that case, we can all just not buy video cards this generation because nothing will be worth buying and we can stop pretending these new cards are some awesome new innovation.
chizow - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
They're still $500 because demand is still strong, its close to EOL, and people still find value in Nvidia parts over AMD.They'll drop the prices to sell off the last few in the channel when they replace the part with something better, but in the meantime, AMD hasn't given any reason for them to slash the prices due to their greedy pricing on the 7950.
Again, this is a departure from past launches where AMD did price their parts sensibly and forced Nvidia to lower prices on its flagship cards (GTX 285 etc).
4 of 11 out of stock is good? After 4 days on the market? I don't think so. I think the market has spoken given every other major launch in the last few years on a high-end SKU like this has resulted in OOS for about a month.
Demand for this part is soft, and at its price/performance that's no surprise and really shouldn't be.
chizow - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
Really? So being the highest-end SKU that AMD produced and within 10-15% of the fastest single-GPU on the planet, it wasn't a high-end card? And I guess AMD didn't have any high-end cards that generation?And "pricing ALWAYS based on performance relative to the competition". So the RV770 coming within 10-15% of the GTX 280 which already launched for $650 and was selling briskly because it deserved that pricing relative to last-gen (9800GX2, 8800GTX) and AMD pricing this part for $299 made sense based on performance relative to the competition? Really?
You're wrong. Stop posting LMAO. RV770 was a price mistake on AMD's part, a mistake they've been trying to correct ever since. Now Nvidia has a chance to return the favor because the 7970/7950 are going to be in a similar position due to the fact they're mispriced based on last-gen metrics.
chizow - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
Newsflash: if you want the newer part, you actually expect better performance for the same price compared to parts that have been out for over a year.Welcome to my used car lot where I sell old cars for brand new prices.
chizow - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
And that's exactly what's wrong with their pricing, an error that will be obvious once its competing against the products its supposed to be competing with.By your same flawed logic, graphics cards would be thousands of dollars as every incremental increase would incur an increase in price without limits.