Review: AMD Radeon HD 7950

In April we took a look at AMD’s latest flagship video card, the Radeon HD 7970, and today we are following up with its little sibling the 7950.

In many respects the two cards are identical. Both are 275mm long, and have an HDMI, DVI and two mini-DisplayPort outputs, but where the 7970 requires one 8-pin and one 6-pin power connector, the 7950 only requires two 6-pin connectors, reflecting its lower power draw of roughly 170W.

All other features introduced with the 7970 are present here too, such as PCI Express 3.0, Zero Core Power, FastHDMI, and Graphics Core Next (check out our HD 7970 review for a full explanation of these).

What is missing in the 7950, however, is just a smidgeon of processing grunt. Under the hood it has 1792 Stream Processors running at 800MHz, giving it roughly 80% of the raw power that the HD 7970 has. On the memory side however it has 3GB of GDDR5 memory connected by a 384bit bus, same as the HD 7970, clocked at 1250MHz (5GHz effective) giving it about 90% of the memory bandwidth.

Looking at the performance stats, the HD 7950 gives you more than 80% of the performance of an HD 7970 for less than 80% of the price ($899 vs $699 RRP) which isn’t a bad trade-off.

It’s not a bad platform for overclockers, either – I got my review sample running at 925MHz/1500MHz Core/Memory speed effortlessly, which gave it a 12% boost in its 3DMark11 score.

Another solid investment opportunity for gamers.

Benchmark/Stat	Details	AMD Radeon HD HD 7970	AMD Radeon HD HD 7950	AMD Radeon HD HD 7770	AMD Radeon HD HD 7750	Nvidia GTX 580	AMD Radeon HD 6850
3DMark 11 (score)	Performance (1280 x 720)	7857	6759	3467	2682	6689	3696
Battlefield 3 (FPS)	High	88.2	73.6	39.3	29.3	684	38.9
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat (FPS)	Ultra, DX11, 4xAA, HBAO high, Tesselation enabled	102.9	86.4	42.3	32.1	88.2	43.5
Unigine Heaven 2.5 (FPS)	Default	67.3	58.7	30.4	24.6	55.7	31.6
Trackmania Nations Forever (FPS)	Very high, 4xAA	84.5	83.5	62.3	56.9	117.0	69.6
Anno 2070 (FPS)	Very high	51.7	42.4	25.1	21.3	42.9	26.2
Average FPS		78.9	68.9	39.9	32.8	74.4	42.0
RRP incl GST		$899	$699	$239	$179	$799	$249
Dollars per FPS (lower = better)		$11.39	$10.14	$5.99	$5.45	$10.73	$5.93