14 DAY TRIAL // Hot on the heels of AMD’s launch of the Radeon HD 7950, XFX announced a new Black Edition graphics card based on this design, that uses a custom cooling solution in order to overclock the GPU to 900MHz.
XFX’ Radeon HD 7950 Black Edition is based on the same “dual dissipation” cooler used by the company for the HD 7970 as well, which includes two large 92mm fans for pushing away the heat produced by the card while running.
Thanks to this advanced cooling setup, XFX was able to push AMD’s graphics card over its reference frequencies and clocked the GPU at 900MHz, while the memory is now working at 1375MHz (5.5GHz data rate).
To put things in perspective, AMD’s recommended operating frequencies for the Radeon HD 7950 are set at 800MHz and 1.250GHz (5GHz effective), respectively.
AMD’s Radeon HD 7950 video card is based on the same Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture as the HD 7970, but its Tahiti Pro GPU comes with one of its Compute Units (CUs) arrays disabled.
This means that the graphics core includes 1792 stream processors (vs. 2048 in the HD 7970), which are joined by 112 texture units, 32 ROP units and the same 384-bit wide bus of its elder brother.
This is connected to 3GB of video buffer, which should theoretically have at its disposal 91% of the memory bandwidth of the 7970.
Sadly, XFX hasn’t mentioned the price of the Radeon HD 7950 Black Edition, but since this card comes factory overclocked, we expect it to be somewhat more expensive than the other Radeon HD 7950 around.
If you want a “cheaper” version of the Radeon HD 7950 Black Edition, XFX is also selling the Double Dissipation Edition that features the exact same cooler, but is clocked at AMD’s reference frequencies.
The only catch right now is that this card seems to go around for $499.99 (379 EUR), which makes it just as expensive as the Asus Radeon HD 7950 DirectCU II Top, which uses a highly customized design featuring an important number of overclocking options.