Wednesday, January 25th 2012
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Radeon HD 7950 Overclocked to HD 7970 Clock Speed, Tested
In its latest round of pre-launch testing of the Radeon HD 7950, DonanimHaber overclocked the GPU to match the clock speeds of the HD 7970, that's 925 MHz core, 1375 MHz (5.50 GHz effective) memory, from its reference clock speed of 800 MHz core, 1250 MHz (5.00 GHz effective), and pitted it against a Radeon HD 7970 reference and GeForce GTX 580 reference. Tests included 3DMark 11 Extreme Preset, and 3DMark Vantage Performance. At the outset these figures establish the HD 7950 to be faster than GTX 580 in the two tests. When overclocked to match the clock speeds of the HD 7970, the HD 7950 on average is 4% slower than it. In related news, DonanimHaber reports that AMD could also be working on affordable variants of the HD 7950 that come with 1536 MB of memory, on the same 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface. That would probably depend on how NVIDIA's lineup stacks up against it.
Source:
DonanimHaber
26 Comments on Radeon HD 7950 Overclocked to HD 7970 Clock Speed, Tested
The huge gains are made with overclocking
This is castrated more than in the case of 6950 vs 6970.
What an underwhelming series of cards.
I still don't understand why people complain about performance when these things are beasts when overclocked and don't tell me you are going to run stock -.-
When the 580 came out November 2010 it was priced at $499... it offered 75%-80% of the performance of the current 7970 that came out a few weeks ago at $550. The $ to performace vs over a year ago has not changed nearly enough. Not to mention, the price of the 580 dropped to $450 - so that makes it even less worth it.
When the 5870 1GB came out in 2009 (for instance)... under $400 with the ability to murder the $380 285 and AND overclock - that was a monster release and is still a very fast card, on par with the 6950 1GB. This was an exciting card - because the technology increased so much at the same price point.
The 7970 offers the performance jump (when OC'd mostly), but counters it with a jump in price that makes it worth the exact same as a card that came out a year ago. It would be the same thing if Nvidia now released kepler that is twice as fast as the 7970, and charged $1,100 for it.
So 7950 should be $300 about + retailer mark up close to $50 or something like this.
Keep in mind you need to find out what the CrystalMeth prices would end up being
or (price + retailer + local tax + fed tax + shipping + some bogus something prices + possible 2x times RMA to retailer cost + cost of time spend on funky driver issues).
+1 AMD gpu division on the 7950.
@ Casecutter - true - but IF their midrange card is competive with the 7970, which is not terribly out of this world, I highly doubt it will come out at $450 or $550 - since those are not "midrange" prices. One never knows though and you have a good point.
platform:
CPU: Intel i7 2600K @4.5GHZ
mobo: ASUS Maximus IV Extreme
GPU: HD7950
RAM: 2X4GB 1600HMZ
HDD: Crucial C300 128GB
Test result:
3Dmark Vantage (at stock frequency):
Total: P6893, GPU: 6510
3Dmark Vantage (overclocked to 925/1350MHz):
Total: P7595, GPU: 7267
tieba.baidu.com/p/1390885451?pn=1
www.chiphell.com/thread-350613-1-1.html
Sapphire is yet to come out with their UniPCB for the HD7900 witch will probably include the Atomic models