AMD Radeon HD 7950 Review Feat. Sapphire & XFX: Sewing Up The High-End Market
by Ryan Smith on January 31, 2012 9:02 AM ESTOverclocking: Power, Temp, & Noise
In their marketing materials AMD is heavily pushing overclocking, and they have good reason to. With the 7970 we’ve established that Tahiti has quite a bit of overclocking headroom, and as the 7950 is clocked lower by default this opens up that headroom even further. Realistically AMD’s binning process means that the best clocking Tahiti GPUs are going to be allocated to the 7970 unless they have failed shaders, but even with that there’s quite a bit of potential on paper.
As with overclocking the 7970, our goal overclocking the 7950 is to see how much you can get for free; that is without any voltage adjustments. AMD’s reference PCBs are not particularly overbuilt for overclocking—cards like that will come later—so sticking to the reference voltage is the safest option, not to mention the easiest. With the 7970 we were able to get 200MHz (22%) overclocks without any voltage adjustment, and we’re hoping for the same out of the 7950.
With that said, we quickly ran into a wall on one card: the Sapphire 7950. Sapphire’s low VID of 0.993v may be great for temperature and noise at stock, but it’s not doing overclocking any favors. We only hit 950MHz at that voltage. As the Sapphire was the odd man out—every other card was at 1.093v—we did end up overvolting the Sapphire to 1.093v to see what it was capable of when put on similar footing as the rest of our cards.
After bringing up the voltage of our Sapphire card, all of our 7950s ended up overclocking to very similar levels. Our Sapphire and AMD cards topped out at 1025MHz core, a 225MHz (28%) overclock over a stock 7950 and a 125MHz (14%) overclock over the Sapphire’s factory overclock, while our XFX card reached 1050MHz, a 150MHz (17%) overclock beyond XFX’s factory overclock. Meanwhile the memory clocks on all of our cards topped out at 5.8GHz, beyond which we’d start seeing performance regressions from error correction on the memory bus.
| Radeon HD 7950 Overclocking | |||||
| AMD Radeon HD 7950 | Sapphire HD 7950 Overclock Edition | XFX R7950 BEDD | |||
| Shipping Core Clock | 800MHz | 900MHz | 900MHz | ||
| Shipping Memory Clock | 5GHz | 5GHz | 5.5GHz | ||
| Shipping Voltage | 1.093v | 0.993v | 1.093v | ||
| Overclock Core Clock | 1025MHz | 1025MHz | 1050MHz | ||
| Overclock Memory Clock | 5.8GHz | 5.8GHz | 5.8GHz | ||
| Overclock Voltage | 1.093v | 1.093v | 1.093v | ||
As you can imagine, with such similar overclocks, gaming performance on all 4 cards ended up being very similar. So we’ll get to gaming performance in a minute, while we’ll start with power, temperature, & noise.
Even though we’re not increasing the voltage on our AMD and XFX cards, merely overclocking them and raising the PowerTune limit to avoid throttling does drive the power consumption up. As is typical with heavily overclocked cards, overclocking quickly drives up power consumption and the 7950s are no exception. After overclocking power consumption is almost identical to the stock 7970, so while you can get 7970 performance you still need to pay the price with 7970 power consumption. Meanwhile it’s interesting to note that even with the extra 0.1v we’ve given the Sapphire card its final power consumption is only ever so slightly higher than the other 7950s, proving that voltage is the great equalizer in this case.
With the increase in power comes an increase in temperatures. The Sapphire card still does very well here staying in the low 70s even under OCCT, while the reference and XFX cards hit the high 70s under Metro and mid 80s under OCCT. As we’ve yet to really ascertain what the thermal limits are for Tahiti, it’s not clear whether there’s too much thermal headroom left for the GPU, particularly under OCCT.
Last but not least we have load noise. The Sapphire card is once more a stellar performer, and we still can’t get it above 50dB even with OCCT. Unfortunately the XFX 7950 BEDD has its biggest fallout yet—it may be able to overclock well, but at 64dB under OCCT the performance isn’t going to be worth the immense amount of noise it creates to move enough air to keep the GPU cool.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
259 Comments
View All Comments
chizow - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 - link
Sorry, but this is incorrect. Nvidia and AMD are direct competitors when it comes to GPUs so relative performance directly influences price.This is why AMD cannot sell CPUs for more than $200. They don't have anything faster than Intel's 10th+ fastest processors (spread over 2-3 generations, its pretty sad actually), so they can't just price Bulldozer at $1000 by slapping an X on it and expect to sell any.
There is a ceiling on the prices they can charge however due to economic and external factors like price elasticity of demand, disposable income, GDP, competing products (consoles etc) so within that construct, AMD and Nvidia have to price their products to make them most attractive to prospective buyers.
They know exactly what % of the market will bite at each price and performance tier using their own gathered market research as well as independent firms like Peddie etc. $400+ is high-end enthusiast, in order to price here, you have to be the top dog, or the 2nd tier. The top dog sets the table for every other GPU, it doesn't matter who makes it.
Historically, this next-gen top dog has shifted the price and performance metric for all next-gen GPUs because the market expects and demands it. That's just progress. Tahiti brings nothing to the table in this regard, its performance is incremental but its pricing just maintains the status quo.
The problem is Tahiti's pricing indicates the GTX 580 was the target it was shooting for, the problem is, they should've been taking aim at Kepler.
JNo - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
chizow - the new pirks?TerdFerguson - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Chizow is right, you guys are wrong. Get over it.Consumer electronics are supposed to get cheaper AND faster at tremendous rates. In failing to improve their price/performance ratio over a couple of generations, AMD has failed. NVidia is failing pretty badly right now, too, but since this is an AMD release, AMD is getting the flack at the moment. If you apply AMD's pricing model to any other consumer electronics product, it becomes very evident that things are very broken. Would you pay $4k for a Ivy Bridge CPU, because IB > SB > Core2 > Core > P4 > P3 > P2 > Pentium > 486 > etc, and a better chip must always command a price premium? Doh, of course you wouldn't.
mdlam - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Pricing is determined and adjusted based on the law of efficient markets. the 580 is 500 dollars only because people are still willing to pay for it, not because of Chizow's ridiculous theory that companies conspire these fabulous schemes to trick people out of their money. So based on this existing market of people willing to pay 500 dollars for gtx580 performance benefits, AMD is going to TAKE those customers away by giving more for less, or more for more in a linear price/performance scale. It's just how markets work, prices don't revolve around these God-like rules of tier1, tier2, tier3. Guess what, AMD is right, because these cards right now are selling higher than the $550 retail price. They should have priced it at $650!mdlam - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
And there is no flawed pricing model to AMD that would end up with a slippery slope of $4k for an Ivy bridge. Prices = aggregate buying desire of the market. All markets usually hit a ceiling price for an item, no matter what it is. Some people have a high ceiling, some people have a low ceiling, its not anyone's fault, its just the fact of life. Any company, AMD or NVIDIA, or INTEL, will price to sell to people with higher ceilings, and when demand is met, lower price to increase adoption from folks with lower ceilings.chizow - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 - link
Sorry, not in this market.If you think this is OK, there would never be any progress in the semiconductor market. Its not like we're talking cars here where a new model year means a few minor upgrades.
With GPUs, CPUs and any other semiconductor, you expect FASTER performance at the SAME prices or CHEAPER prices. That's called progress.
The law of efficient markets would tell you if you bought a GTX 580 14 months ago, you made the right call. Buying today, you're setting yourself up for some heartache, but more probably, you're kicking yourself for waiting.
Arnir69 - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
I'm really disappointed with 7950 too, it's a little bit better than 580 but not enough to justify a such a long wait, it's performance is well short of expectation in BF3.hyperdoggy - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
While I'm not in favor of the prices AMD has set for the new cards, you do realize that Nvidia has never prices their cards low right? A quick price check history will show you since the FX day Nvidia has priced their card to sell your kidney. It was the tnt days that Nvidia did a price favor vs their competitors. I bet you my right kidney(i sold my left one for a 8800gtx for $650 day 1 of lunch) that Kepler will be no different, regardless of what its performance will be.I never got the fanboy aspect of things, you see gamers that can calculate min-max fps better than most math majors yet somehow only see red or green when the numbers are laid out right in front of them. I'm shame to say i'm old enough to been around from the voodoo days, i went to Voodoo, Nvidia, Ati, Nvidia, Ati, Nvidia, and now name AMD for more than i can remember. Go for what's best at the time you need an upgrade. Stop making yourself colored hulk when your team doesn't have a product to be competitive.
SlyNine - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Yea and the 8800GTX kicked stomped the crap out of the competition. This is just a bump up, and kick stomp prices.Plus this is AMD not Nvidia. Where is the 5870, the 9700pro. This is closer to a 5800Ultra or a 2900XT. Of course those cards at least had some real competition in the form of a 8800GTX and 9700pro.
If the 8800GTX and 9700pro would have only increased performance as much as say the 6970 or 580GTX ( compared to their previous cards 5870/480) then the analogy would truly work and the 7970 would basicly be the 2900XT/5800Ultra of its day.
chizow - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Actually if you look at recent pricing history, you'd see Nvidia has kept their flagship pricing in-line and much lower than what we are seeing here with SI, despite the fact Nvidia had the leading part for that generation in both cases with the GTX 480 and GTX 580.Both of those parts launched at $500 and were faster than AMD's competing same-generation part. If Nvidia did the same as AMD, the 580 would've been priced at $550-600 for that 10-15% performance bump over the 480, but they kept their pricing constant while increasing performance. As I stated earlier, AMD definitely had a hand in this when they undercut the GTX 280 so badly in 2008, but Nvidia did learn their mistake and has not raised the pricing metric since.
Now Nvidia does have a decision to make. If they beat SI with Kepler as expected, they can go with AMD's pricing which will again, make no sense. Or they can stick to their historical price/performance model and make AMD look really bad just as AMD did to them 3 1/2 years ago.