Sapphire HD 7950 FleX Review - PAGE 2

Sapphire has a long history of using AMD's cover girl Ruby and even while the rest of the box changes around her, she is one lady we can rely on. This time around Ruby is geared up in vintage war attire, though the cleavage doesn't appear regulation. Sapphire has listed the specifications of the card all around Ruby which include the model name, thermal design, amount of memory, along with all the key features and sticker indicating this model is factory overclocked.

The reverse panel includes another image of Ruby, but this time from the back. The panel also includes a large section that lists the multiple awards Sapphire's products have collected throughout the years. The main purpose of this panel however is to give the consumer the details about the graphics card by explaining the key features and their benefits. All of the key features are listed on the right side of the box and consist of icons highlighting the GCN architecture, GDDR5 memory, as well as support for Eyefinity, CrossFireX, PCIe 3.0, AMD App Acceleration, DirectX 11 and HD3D technologies.

As part of the FleX family, this model comes with more accessories than traditional graphics cards. In total Sapphire has bundled two 4-pin to 6-pin power adapters, a CrosFireX bridge, a 1.8 meter High Speed HDMI cable along with a VGA convertor, DVI to HDMI adapter, Mini-DP to DP adapter and the installation materials.

Starting with the specifications the HD 7950 is built on AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture which is a radical departure from their previous VLIW design. AMD moved away from VLIW to improve the compute power of the graphics card while maintaining excellent gaming power and reduced power consumption. The new GCN core consists of 1792 streaming processors, 32 ROPS and 112 texture units. Along with the 860MHz clock speed, this gives the card a total compute power of over 2.87 TFLOPs. Additionally, the HD 7950 has the same 384-bit 3GB GDDR5 fame buffer that the HD 7970 has, with the only exception being the clock speed on this model is set at 1250MHz (5Gbps QDR) instead of 1375MHz (5.5Gbps QDR).

Like the 6900 series, the HD 7950 comes equipped with PowerTune technology, which is essentially a power management system that maximizes the performance of the board via dynamic power adjustment. It does this by increasing the GPU clock speed in real time when the GPU detects power headroom, and throttling the clocks when a certain power limit is exceeded. This allows the board to adjust the clock speeds on a microsecond level. The maximum PowerTune rating for the HD 7950 is around 200W at load. Since the power rating is above 150W the Sapphire HD 7950 FleX does require dual 6-pin power connectors. However, this leaves around 25W of additional power that can be used for overclocking the core.

The 7000 series also comes with an interesting new feature called; "Zero Core Power". What this technology does is reduce the power consumption of Southern Islands graphics cards to around 3W when the system is in a long idle state. This technology is most impressive when using more than one graphics card, because at idle the additional graphics cards are disabled, shutting down the fans and capping any voltage from going to the core. Since PowerTune works on a microsecond level, "Zero Core Power" will not interfere with gaming as all the GPUs can become active again in just microseconds. This technology can dramatically reduce the power consumption of a system, but it can also reduce extra noise for CrossFireX users when not actively gaming.

Since this card is designed for Eyefinty it is no surprise to find Sapphire has included five on-board video outputs instead of the four traditionally found on Southern Islands graphics cards. This gives the FleX two Mini-DP connectors, a single HDMI 1.4a connector and a Dual-Link DVI connector and a Single-Link DVI connector. In this configuration Eyefinity would still require one monitor to be connected via DisplayPort, but with the included HDMI to DVI adapter three DVI monitors can be driven by this card. Essentially this means three DVI displays can be connected out of the box, up to a maximum of five if the remaining two monitors are DisplayPort compatible

The on-board DisplayPort use the 1.2 standard, enabling support for up to three monitors per port (via MST Hub) as well as AMD HD3D technology. The middle HDMI 1.4a connector also supports 3GHz speeds with frame packing. Essentially this allows the connection to run the frames faster, thus creating a smoother gaming experience. The HDMI and DP ports can also be teamed together to support HD3D Surround, which is a feature new to Eyefinity 2.0.