14 DAY TRIAL // If anyone was wondering whether or not any of AMD's partners were gunning for people with less cash on their hands, Sapphire seems to be it.
The AMD Radeon HD 7950 family will truly be extensive once the official launch happens on January 31, this year (2012).
There have already been a fair number of leaks, rumors and pictures about both the reference and the custom cards.
Now, Sapphire is adding to the list again, after having already been revealed to be working on the HD7950 3G GDDR5 PCI-E HDMI/DVI-I/DUAL MINI DP OC VERSION (detailed here).
As reports will reveal, Sapphire has designed at least one other Radeon HD 7950 card.
Meant to be more affordable, it does not possess a high-end cooling solution and also lacks factory overclocking.
That means that the clock frequencies are of 800 MHz for the GPU (graphics processing unit) and 5 GHz for the memory (3GB GDDR5 VRAM).
Moving on, the PCB (printed circuit board) is colored blue and is probably the reference design AMD decided on for the cost-effective adapters.
As for the cooler itself, it is a fairly standard-looking, two-slot component, though bearing the customary Sapphire logo.
For those interested in the other Sapphire card mentioned in this article, it is a factory-overclocked board with two fans.
Curiously, though, while the GPU does work at 100MHz more than the stock number (900 MHz), the memory frequency is said to be unchanged from 5 GHz.
Either way, should buyers so wish it, they will have enough means to try their hand at overclocking it themselves.
The only perceivable downside, if it can even be called that, lies in how, contrary to initial hopes, the HD 7950 will not be able to unlock into the 7970, even by installing a special BIOS, or so the reference design implies.