 Welcome to my unboxing of something that's actually fairly exciting. This is the Radeon HD 7950. This is a bit of a step down from the 7970, but they haven't actually reduced the performance that much. So today, not only do I have a Radeon HD 7950 to unbox and take a bit of a look at, but I have a particularly special one. So this is the XFX Double D, and that is not to say that it goes here necessarily, but rather to say that it is double dissipation. So that means they've put an aftermarket cooler on what is otherwise still a reference 7950, so you can rest assured that you're getting the quality that goes along with a reference board or whatever else, but you are also getting two fans for removing heat from your card. So what does XFX have to say about it? Let's go with that first, and then we'll open up the card itself. So it has three gigs of memory for max effect and resolutions. I'm sure they mean effects and resolutions, but yeah, basically what that means is that if you're running even three monitors in iFinity mode, you're going to have enough of a frame buffer in order to not suffer from a serious performance lag that results when the graphics memory fills up and you have to go to your hard drive, which is slow, or even system memory or anywhere else is slower than graphics memory. Next generation performance, they are very correct about that, even though this is not a top of the range card, it does perform as well or better than Nvidia's premium GTX 580 Ghost Thermal maximizes their flow for exceptional venting throughout the card. That's interesting. Let's take a look at that. What else we got here? Multi-monitor difference. Yeah, okay. So it does support iFinity. It's up to four monitors. Unique dual fan design allows air to cool everything, including thermal, including GPU heatsinks components in the PCB board. So that I'll believe. Okay. What else we got here? Oh, five star support. Register your product and get industry leading five star support. Yeah, make sure you register. Okay. Genultra bandwidth. KPCI-E 3.0. Yes, it does have PCI-E 3.0. So we'll talk about that a little bit more after. Okay. Tessellation. Bullet physics engine. Resident textures. Okay. These are probably kind of extreme examples, but basically more better than before. Hydrocell thermal solution. Interesting. Condensation wicks, evaporation wicks. Okay. So they're talking about basically, what are they called again? Vapor chambers. Yep. Vapor chambers. Okay. Cool. Perfect for overclocking. Okay. Cool. Let's get it opened up. First, we have a little brochure for their Pro Series power supplies. Other great XFX products, including adapters. Hardware limited warranty. Let's have a look at, oh, okay. So they want you to go and check it out on xfxforce.com. Quick install guide. Driver CD install guide. Okay. And there's the driver CD. Next, we've got a crossfire bridge as well as an HDMI to DVI adapter. That's an interesting one. You don't see that included with video cards very often. We've also got one of XFX's trademark door hangers. I've actually got one in this room over here. Check it out. This is an older one. This is from back when XFX did Nvidia graphics cards. But there, see, now I have another one to go with it. Pretty cool. And they also keep your serial number and all that cool information on the back of it. So that means that you can not have to pull the card out of your system if you ever need to look anything up on the XFX website or register it or whatever else. So let's open up the Double Dissipation 7950 and have a look at it. So these are two, are these 90 mil fans? Hold on a sec. Sorry. These are two 92 mil fans over a huge, wow, look at this. Oh, this is interesting. So this is what they mean by this. Over a huge heat sink array. So you can see the heat sink goes all the way from here down to here. It's got a bit of a stepped appearance going on. So that means it can benefit not only from the air that is blowing directly down onto the PCB but also some of that incidental airflow that comes from around the edge of the spinning fan. So you can see they built up the heat sink in these areas in order to take advantage of that. You can see we've got a sleeved connector here that provides power for one, two fans. And then you can see what they mean. This is their interesting cooler design here. So they've actually left it quite open around the bottom of the card. So here's our PCI Express 3.0 16x slot. And what that means is that some of the incidental airflow from these fans is going to cool not only the graphics card itself but also your motherboard below it. Now with some last generation products from both the AMD and the Nvidia side, a design like this wasn't really an option because they needed all the airflow possible from these fans in order to keep the graphics card cool enough. But the 7950 is actually significantly cooler running and more efficient than some of these last generation products due to the improved manufacturing process. So we're able to take advantage of some of this airflow and use it to cool the rest of your system and ensure that not only does your graphics card run stable but so does your entire PC. On the back you can see the other, the end of this aluminum shroud goes right here. On the top, this is a very nice touch. Check this out. So not only you can see it's quite open, you can see those fan blades in there. See me spinning them? So that same kind of thinking, although I don't see how it's nearly as beneficial here, but I guess what it does is it also provides less restriction for the fans overall. So not only can you exhaust air out the back of the card, not so much out this side, but out here you can also exhaust all the air from your fans all around the card which means that they're not going to be very restricted. But XFX has included instead of a plastic accent here, they've included an aluminum accent. It's got kind of a brushed finish to it just like the rest of the cooler that looks very, very sharp. It's branded with their Ghost Thermal Technology bit here as well as their XFX R7950 thing that's going on here. The good news about this entire cooler is that none of the numbers can fall off like I had happened during my 7970 unboxing video. Now let's have a look at the back of this card. This is not a reference board. So I was mistaken. This is an aftermarket cooler on an aftermarket board. It looks like they're probably using the reference design but this is clearly an XFX style matte black PCB. So there you go guys. I stand corrected on that. You can see all of the memory chips are installed on the other side of the PCB. So that's 3 gigs of RAM over there. Our VRMs are here. Our power is here. You can see there are pinouts for a 6 pin and an 8 pin but the card itself due to its lower power requirements compared to the 7970 only uses dual 6 pins. We've got 2 crossfire connectors so that is for connecting to other cards to run in crossfire. I've already talked about the PCI Express 3.0 so that is Gen 3 PCIe connector on the bottom but what I should also mention is that it is fully backwards compatible with the PCI Express Gen 2 or even PCI Express Gen 1 motherboard so don't worry about that although if you go all the way back to a Gen 1 board you're probably going to be bottlenecking this graphics card with the interface itself however this graphics card is still by I mean when it's saturating a PCIe Gen 1 interface is still going to be more than any CPU that runs on that motherboard is going to be able to keep up with anyway. So the bottleneck will still exist on the CPU side not with the PCI Express interface. So now let's go ahead and have a look at what we've got for inputs and outputs. Oh I see why we have an HDMI to DVI adapter it's so that we can easily run dual DVI since most people running two displays are using that and then with four displays you can go either DVI HDMI mini display port mini display port or DVI DVI via adapter mini display port mini display port. We've got a little XFX branded exhaust slot going on there and I think that pretty much covers it. So what is the benefit of the 7950? Well the 7950 is cheaper than the 7970 we covered that already. Over clocks like a beast even though the reference stock clock speed is only 800 megahertz these cards have been seen already going up around the 1000 megahertz or 1 gigahertz mark. So what that means is we're looking at 20 to 25 percent over clocks on an enthusiast level graphics card which hasn't been seen in a fair while. So I guess not only did AMD achieve better thermal performance and better power consumption with their new manufacturing process but also better overclocking headroom. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the XFX 7950DD. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxing reviews and other computer videos.