Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 OC Edition Graphics Card Now Official

Sapphire, one of AMD’s closest add-in board partners, has just announced the release of two new graphics cards based on the Radeon HD 7950 design, including one factory overclocked model with a 900MHz GPU clock.

Both of these cards use a cooling system developed in-house by Sapphire, the standard clocked version coming with a single centrally placed fan, while the OC edition sports a dual-fan setup.

Right beneath these two fans, Sapphire has placed a large aluminum fin array that draws the heat away from the Radeon HD 7950 GPU, via five large copper heatpipes.

This powerful cooling assembly enabled Sapphire to increase the operating frequency of the GPU to 900MHz, 100MHz more than AMD’s recommended clock for the HD 7950, while the memory works at the same stock 1,250MHz (5GHz data rate).

Users who require even more performance can also overclock the card beyond these frequencies using the TriXX utility that comes bundled together with Sapphire’s creation.

Apart from the GPU and memory clocks, Sapphire’s tool also allows for the GPU voltage to be modified up to 1.093v.

Pricing for the single-fan Radeon HD 7950 has been set at US $449 (about 350 EUR), while the factory overclocked version retails for $30 (22.7 EUR) more, which isn’t a bad deal if you ask us.

Made official earlier today, the Radeon HD 7950 uses the Tahiti Pro GPU, which includes a total of 1792 stream processors (vs. 2048 in the HD 7970), 112 texture units, 32 ROP units and the same 384-bit wide bus of its elder brother.

The stock operating clocks of the video card are set at 800MHz for the GPU, while the GDDR5 memory is running at 1.25GHz, but AMD’s AIB partners, Sapphire included, are allowed to overclock these if they want to increase the performance of their cards.