As expected, one of them is factory overclocked while the other isn't

Jan 31, 2012 15:21 GMT  ·  By

Since Advanced Micro Devices finally made the official introduction of the Radeon HD 7950, PowerColor decided to reveal its own two cards.

We have already seen the video controllers prepared by VTX3D and Micro-Star International (with and without Twin Frozr III cooling).

Now, we are looking at PowerColor, otherwise known as TUL Corporation.

The company has two cards to sell, dubbed PowerColor HD7950 series and PCS+ HD7950.

They share the majority of specifications: 3GB of GDDR5 VRAM, an interface of 384 bits, support for DirectX 11.1 and a memory clock of 5GHz.

What's more, the two adapters boast support for AMD Eyefinity 2.0 technology, HD3D and AMD PowerTune, plus AMD App Acceleration, which offloads tasks from the CPU to the GPU.

What sets the two apart are the frequencies of the GPUs and the cooling technologies.

While the “regular” PowerColor HD7950 has a single fan and a GPU frequency of 800 MHz, the PowerColor PCS+ HD7950 works at 880 MHz and uses a much stronger cooler.

It is armed with two fans (92mm in diameter each), three 8mm heatpipes and a pure copper base that covers the whole GPU.

The result is a temperature reduction of 15% and a much more silent operation (20%) compared to AMD's default solution.

The AMD Radeon HD 7950 has a price of around $450 in the United States and 420 Euro in Europe, or so the word goes.

The PowerColor PCS+ may go a bit higher than that, but not by too much, since it would not be able to compete with rival controllers otherwise.

Then again, $450/ 420 Euro is already a bit expensive, even knowing that AMD's newcomer scored higher than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580 in benchmarks.

As always, it falls to prospective buyers to weigh the pros and cons of each product when browsing through their options.

Photo Gallery (2 Images)

PowerColor HD 7950
PowerColor PCS+ HD 7950
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