 Today's video is going to be about the Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 and I guess the 7950 in general, although I'll be testing it a couple of different ways. So first of all, a quick overview of the card. It's a 7950, which means that aside from the fact that it's got a custom PCB, okay, it's got a custom shroud with custom dual 92mm fan cooling, big old fat heat pipes also for cooling right there, big fin array heat spreader for all the memory and VRM and all that good stuff. You can see that down here, the black piece. It's got up to four displays out with DVI, HDMI, and dual mini display ports. It is a PCI Express 3.0 card, 2 PCIe power. Other than that, it is a completely normal 7950 except this is an overclocked edition. So this is an overclocked card. So I'm going to be testing it two ways. I'm going to test it in its default config and then I'm going to manually dial it down to regular 7950 to see how much performance we're getting by buying this overclocked card versus a different one. In terms of the competition, we've got quite a few things. Because this is a next generation card, it's an overclocked card, I'm going to be comparing it against not only things that are somewhat fair like the GTX 570 and 580 which are in sort of similar price bands and they're similar types of products, but also the GTX 590 which is a dual GPU card, the HD 6970 as well as 6950 with the dual BIOS switch on this particular card. I can test it either way although it is a 6970. I just hit the switch up to position two and I can test it as a 6950. I'm also comparing it to its big brother, the 7970 although that is a 100% vanilla card. So we're going to see how this overclocked edition compares not only to the 7970 but also to what it itself would be if it wasn't overclocked. Before we get to benchmarking results, I want to walk you guys through the card a little bit. So here it is on my test bench. I actually haven't seen the performance numbers of this particular card yet, but I want to start with another number that's very interesting. So due to the 28 nanometer manufacturing process and some clever engineering from AMD, this system idles at 86 watts from the wall. I'm freaking believable. The card is near silent so even over my Corsair Reach 70 and Noctua fans, you can probably only start to pick up these fans that idle at about this far away. At probably about three or four inches away. So that's very cool. Makes the system very quiet because you can see the Corsair fan also doesn't spin when the power consumption is very low. Bear in mind with that 86 watts at the wall, this is an overclocked to 4 gigahertz Core i7 2600K with no Intel power saving features enabled on it. So it's at 4 gigahertz right now. Simply astounding. Oh yeah, finally idle temperatures. So we're also going to log the temperatures during our benchmark and find out how hot it gets during a gaming load. So at default 7950 clocks, that's where we took these power measurements and temperature readings. We are peaking at 55 degrees and I'm going to have to fire up a game again in order to check the power because I forgot. With load power consumption just north of 200 watts. So that means with this 80 plus gold power supply, which check it out, the fan isn't even spinning in a game scenario. We're actually only powering, giving the system about 200 watts of power with about 220 watts being pulled from the wall. With the card at its 900 megahertz default overclocked speed, we were only one degree higher at idle and just a touch higher in terms of power consumption at the wall. It hovers around 90 degrees give or take. Just idling at the desktop. So now let's fire it up and see what kind of performance numbers we can get out of it. Power consumption again in the Witcher 2 seems to be pretty much identical. And this stands to reason because I haven't actually changed any voltage settings to undervolt it and then to re-overvolt it back to its default speed of 900 megahertz. So let's have a look at our maximum temperature, which is 56. So we managed to get one degree toastier. There's a 56 there somewhere. And it stays very, very quiet. I also noticed that this particular card exhibits significantly less coil winds, sorry about the focus there guys, than most of the AMD reference cards that I have encountered, whether it's that one, that one, or that one. So that was a huge positive surprise for me. So I'm going to go ahead and compile the results. And we're, oh, I showed you power, okay, I showed you power consumption, I showed you load temps at the overclocked speed. So let's have a look at the performance. I used Crysis 2, The Witcher, as well as Battlefield 3. So if you guys really care to analyze this, then you can go ahead and freeze the frame here. And you can see all of the data, including min, max, and average for the three games that we're testing and all of the cards. I just want to clarify one thing. This is the 7970. This is the 7970 with a 7950 BIOS on it, because I wanted to see how closely it would perform to a 7950 at stock speed with the BIOS flash to 7950, because I was really hoping I'd be able to do the same thing that I do with my 6970, where I can use it as a 6970 or a 6950. But it looks like the 7900 series doesn't disable the functional units if you flash it with a different BIOS. So that's what that weird Cryptic B2 result is. I have the 7950 OC, so the Sapphire OC'd card, and then I turned it down to stock 7950 speed so we could get those results as well. So other than that, it should be fairly self-explanatory. One other thing that's going to stand out to you guys is that in Battlefield 3, the 6990 didn't seem to be performing right, although I included it anyway, because honestly it's been my experience with the 6990 overall, hence it being shelved at the moment over there, literally shelved. That it's just a bear to work with. It's not very consistent. So GTX 590 is the big winner with 7970 outperforming everything else in spite of it being a single GPU card. The 7950 OC does perform a little bit better, although if we go back to the MinMax average, you can see that the overclocked minimum is significantly better than the stock minimum, so it does seem to be helping. There you go, there's those results. Average FPS. Then we got Crysis 2. So Crysis 2, the two dual GPU cards are pretty much neck and neck. Sorry, I didn't add the data labels. There you go. Oh, and I didn't change the formatting here. Whatever, you guys are cool. You don't mind waiting. Hold on. There we go, fixed it. Those are legible. So the dual GPU cards lead the way. 70 comes in second with the GTX 580 exactly tied with the 7950 OC, making the 7950 OC a significantly better value. And this one also we see a fairly different performance level from the overclocked card versus the stock card. Something to be noted here is that these dual GPU cards, neither of them scale particularly well, which means we're probably running into a CPU-bound scenario around 130 FPS on this game. Finally, The Witcher 2. Very, very GPU bound. You can see the dual GPU cards do pull away. The 7970 performs at the top of the single GPUs with the 7950 coming in just behind it. So we're going to add the data labels there and we're going to go and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, move those decimals so you guys don't have to look at completely illegible numbers. Second, fixed. Okay. And then the Nvidia cards really fall down at the bottom of the heap of this one with the last generation AMD card. So this game really shows the power of the 7950 with the OC card coming in somewhere between a 7950 stock card and a 7970, which is significantly more expensive. So there you have it. 28 nanometer architecture delivers awesome power consumption, great performance. It's a dual BIOS card supporting iFINITY with up to four displays. The dual fans run cool and quiet. I'm actually really impressed with the cooler on this particular card. So thank you for checking out this performance review and overview of the Sapphire 7950 OC. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more reviews, unboxings, and other computer videos.