ATI 7950 - Sapphire & Gigabyte Overview!

ATI’s 7950 – Sapphire & Gigabyte Overview
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Released today is ATI’s latest addition to its 28nm 7900 series graphic cards, the 7950 and we’ll be looking at the Sapphire OC Edition & the Gigabyte standard card.

The Sapphire card comes in traditional Sapphire form, simple cardboard boxes with the card in anti-static bag. Beneath the cards moulding you’ll find a box with assorted cables and documentation. I was quite impressed with the amount of cables that come packaged with the Sapphire, definitely haven’t skimped out on the accessories.

Unravelling the card reveals its two fans mounted over a custom heat sink with light plastic moulding. By design it is obvious this card is good for heat dissipation and airflow. The card comes ready with a DVI, HDMI and 2x DisplayPort outputs. The card is also 3D ready using its own AMD HD3D technology.

The Gigabyte card comes in nicely shaped and moulded white foam in a white box. Accessories aren’t a great deal with this card so be prepared for any extra costs.

Opening the card we are exposed to its 3 fans and unique heat sink design. Now, I’m no expert but already I can sense the 3 fans could cause a bit of turbulence with air flow, after all you want a nice solid stream of air being flowed onto your heat sinks and I think with 3 fans, this could cause a slight disturbance. They’ve labelled the 3 fan system as WINFORCE on the packaging, which by the diagrams on the box, looks like it means ‘a whole lotta air pushing through the card’.

The Gigabyte comes with the same outputs as the Sapphire model and supports up to 4 displays.

So let’s take a look at the guts of the cards

	Sapphire	Gigabyte
GPU	Radeon 7950	Radeon 7950
Bus Interface	PCI-E 3.0 x16	PCI-E 3.0 x16
Memory	3072MB / 384-bit GDDR5	3072MB / 384-bit GDDR5
Clock	900MHz	900MHz
Cooling	2 Fan Dual-X Cooling	WINDFORCE
Dimensions	275x115x42	275x115x42
HDCP	Yes	Yes

By Sahin Selvi
sahin.s@centrecom.com.au

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