Monday, January 30th 2012
Single Fan Non-Reference Design Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Pictured
A little earlier this month, we were treated to pictures of Sapphire's dual-fan Radeon HD 7950 OC graphics card. It appears that the card pictured earlier is not the only non-reference design HD 7950 from Sapphire, as it has a slightly more affordable single-fan model in the works. This model likely sticks to AMD reference clock speeds of 800 MHz core, 1250 MHz (5.00 GHz GDDR5 effective) out of the box.
The single-fan HD 7950 appears to have a blue-colored PCB that is likely to be AMD's cost-effective reference design. The cooler appears to have a compact heatsink that is cooled by a single central fan. Display outputs include two mini-DisplayPort, and one each of HDMI and DVI. We're also hearing from the source that 900 MHz core with unchanged (1250/5000 MHz) memory will be the maximum factory-OC permitted by AMD to AIB partners. That is not to say that the HD 7950's OC potential beyond that will be limited in any way.Update: Augmented with more images from Expreview.
Sources:
OBR-Hardware, Expreview
The single-fan HD 7950 appears to have a blue-colored PCB that is likely to be AMD's cost-effective reference design. The cooler appears to have a compact heatsink that is cooled by a single central fan. Display outputs include two mini-DisplayPort, and one each of HDMI and DVI. We're also hearing from the source that 900 MHz core with unchanged (1250/5000 MHz) memory will be the maximum factory-OC permitted by AMD to AIB partners. That is not to say that the HD 7950's OC potential beyond that will be limited in any way.Update: Augmented with more images from Expreview.
61 Comments on Single Fan Non-Reference Design Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Pictured
Both the Sapphire (OC Edition) card I have here and Powercolor 7950 use exactly the same PCB, just a different colour
Edit: @ ShockG, I think you're right about that being ref design. A decent PWM arrary if so, but that heatsink looks barely capable.
My XFX HD 6950 had one. Temps at stock reached up to 90C.
1.7950 runs really cool nd its a gud point Or
2.The cooler design is a serious crap
and yes these cards run really cool, no need for a massive cooler I've found. Much much quieter than the 7970 ref cards though even at full tilt.
As far as the cooler goes on this card though..... I hate the design. It was a stupid design that they implemented on the HD6950's. It works like shit and cools like shit. They really have cheapen out on the cooler.
One more thing to add.... While I will admit I was expecting more from these cards we have to remember these are preliminary benchmarks on cards with drivers that are not mature yet. The fact is this card still beats a GTX 580 stock for stock right now. I also have no doubt that NV will be able to beat the performance gains of these cards when the GTX 600/700 series releases. But for right now we don't know when exactly that will be. That could still be another 6 months away if history repeats its self. So to blast on these AMD cards I think is a little premature for now. Because honestly everyone here could just say something like "Oh yeah well when the HD8970's release Kepler is gonna look like shit" It's pointless to compare unreleased cards to released cards.
And that cooler is a big nono, the DualFan though is amazing.
Overclocking results? this thing can improve 33% at ease... I'd say
BTW overclocking these things is not an easy and quick thing to do as they throttle like hell with extra voltage
And there's no throttling happening. Card is scaling well with clock speeds
That doesn't do anything using 1.26V for that clock speed. Memory clocking on this particular sample isn't good as 1.6GHz will crash, but on the other 7950s 1.625Ghz is easy with no memory voltage adjustments