 Better late than never, that's what I say and I hope you guys agree. This will be my, oh I don't know where my knife is, there it is, this will be my unboxing and first look at the Radeon HD 7950 from Sapphire. Now there's something a little bit special about this particular HD 7950 from Sapphire and that is that in addition to being a non-reference design, so that is to say it comes on a non-reference PCB which we've come to expect from 7950s, it also has a non-reference cooler and it is overclocked. So it's a 3 gig card, has support for their Trix tweak and overclock utility for Sapphire graphics cards, it comes with an HDMI cable, okay so this is all very interesting. There's a lot of stuff here but we're going to cover most of this when we get a little bit further in. So much like the Radeon HD 7970, so this is an OEM card with the completely dull as anything reference cooler, reference PCB, so unlike, similarly to the 7970, it uses the Tahiti core so that is a 28 nanometer GPU and the difference is that it has slightly fewer functional units than the 7970 and in its default configuration anyway, it is clocked a little bit lower. Both of these graphics cards have 3 gigs of memory and they're using the latest 28 nanometer manufacturing process in order to achieve outstanding performance with really what is, was previously thought to be completely unbelievable power consumption, not unbelievable in a bad way, unbelievable in a good way. We're not talking like, you know, GTX 480 here, we're talking like, seems like it could be like a 2600 Pro in terms of the power consumption at idle but it is actually a full fledged gaming card. So inside the box we find the driver installation disc, we find a quick installation guide, we find a product registration card, probably a good idea to use that. Okay, Crossfire Bridge, lots of, wow look at all this stuff, it comes with lots of stuff. So we've got two 8-pin, oh no, we have two Molex, two PCIe 6-pin adapters, there's the 1.8 meter HDMI cable that they claimed was included and I have now validated that it is actually included. We also get a mini display port to display port adapter, a HDMI to DVI adapter, although it should be noted that this will only work for single link DVI so that is up to 1920 by 1200 at 60 Hz because you are still relying on the HDMI port which is only single link. We've also got a DVI to VGA adapter so we can go ahead and throw all of these back in here and let's have a look at the card itself. So yes, I have all these other cards over here and I'm definitely getting to that, that's going to be more of a size comparison thing than anything else. There we go, wow that's actually a gorgeous looking card. So here we have it, the Sapphire HD 7950, it has dual 92mm cooling fans on a very, very robust looking cooler so check this out. We've got dual thick heat pipes and then triple thinner heat pipes, all of them are taking heat away from the GPU core itself which you can actually see right there, from the GPU core itself as far away as possible to the aluminum fins that are cooling it. So what you'll notice is that they use the thicker heat pipes for the greater distances in order to make sure that we're carrying heat effectively away even over here so that this fan actually has heat to carry away from the metal in order to cool the GPU itself. It uses a very, very open design so you can see as I turn it around, the fan's airflow is not impeded pretty much in any way by a shroud or any other characteristics of the cooler itself. So it's got a plastic shroud right here and then it's, see that? Free airflow coming from the fans down out around the GPU. What this means is a couple of things. So one, it means that heat is being expelled into your case so if you don't have a decent case that has intake fans and exhaust fans, if you're using like a crummy mini tower or something like that, you might not prefer a card like this. You might prefer one that sticks with a more reference design which is an external exhaust blower fan like that. However, if you do have a decent case, these are usually much more effective than those reference coolers at removing heat from the GPU, the memory, and the VRM and at the cost that you do expel some of the heat into your case. So yeah, something to consider. What do, actually speaking of VRM, what are we doing for VRM cooling? Oh, this is kind of smart. Check this out. So they've got the usual sort of GPU cooling thing going on here but then they've also added a heat spreader. So you see this black piece right here that goes pretty much all the way around and wraps up here around the top. So that's covering up all the memory modules. All three gigs of memory are actually located, you can see the positions of them, are located on this side of the PCB. Some of the other VRM components are not covered by heat sink but they do have direct airflow from a fan coming down on them from the top. So right, I was saying advantages and drawbacks of these coolers. Right, so they tend to be cooler and quieter than reference coolers but the drawback is that they do exhaust the heat into your case. So just make sure you got a decent case. Or like me, no case. That is another solution. Okay, so what other characteristics here? So you saw the two included Molex to 6-pin PCIe adapters. That's because this card requires two PCI Express 6-pin adapters. You can see on it, actually this is kind of interesting. Yeah, so this is a completely non-reference card. Okay, you can see on it that there was room for an 8-pin adapter here but they did not deem that to be necessary. Remember the Tahiti Pro, so that's the 7950, does not require as much power as the 7970. In terms of output options, these are very similar to what we're used to seeing on these cards. It does support up to four display iFINITY. So that is DVI, HDMI, and two mini display ports right here. And on the back, I guess there's not much else to say about it. Now why do I have all these cards here? Right, let's get to that. This is an overclocked card. So what I want to find out, because I've never actually taken a look at a not overclocked, actually this is more like this. Yeah, there we go. I've never actually taken a look at a non-overclocked 7950. So one of the things I tried to do tonight was flash my 7970 reference card with a 7950 BIOS to see if I could actually turn off some of the shaders so that I could compare this against a fully referenced 7950. But I'm not able to do that, unfortunately. It just turns down the clock speed. It doesn't turn down the shaders. So what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be taking this overclocked version of the card and I'm going to see how it compares against A itself at stock clock speed. So I'll just dial them back to reference clocks using the included overclocking utility, which can also be used for underclocking. And then I also want to compare it against a wide variety of other cards. So here I have a 6990, GTX 590, I have a 7970, GTX 580, I have the 7950, which will be OC and not OC, but it'll be the same card. I'm just going to change the clock speeds. I have a GTX 570 and I have a 6970 slash 6950. So I use the BIOS switch in order to switch this card between those two different BIOSes because this one can be locked and unlocked. So stay tuned. On-linus tech tips for a closer look at this card. We're also going to profile the overall noise and heat characteristics of it. 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