14 DAY TRIAL // PowerColor is getting ready for the imminent launch of AMD’s Tahiti Pro GPU and one of its most impressive graphics cards to use this new core, the Radeon HD 7950 PCS, has just made its appearance thanks to a leaked picture published just recently.
The card was designed to use a custom cooling solution developed in-house by PowerColor which makes use of two 80mm diameter fans placed on top of a large aluminum heatsink.
On a first look, this fin-stack heatsink reminds quite a lot of PowerColor’s previous PCS coolers and it apparently uses four nickel-platted copper heatpipes from drawing the heat away from the GPU.
No information regarding the specifications of the card, or its launch date, was provided by TechPowerUp, but judging by the advanced cooling used, we would say that PowerColor plans to sell this factory overclocked.
AMD’s Radeon HD 7950 is based on the same Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture and Tahiti GPU as that used for the HD 7970, but this comes with four of the core’s Compute Units disabled to turn it into the Tahiti Pro.
The end result is a graphics card that 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 amount of memory installed also wasn’t modified so we are talking about the same 3GB of GDDR5 video buffer which has a stock operating speed of 1.25GHz (5GHz data rate). AMD recommends for the Tahiti Pro GPU to be clocked at 900MHz.
Other AMD Radeon HD 7950 features include support for one DVI, one HDMI and two mini-DisplayPort video outputs as well as PCI Express 3.0 and DirectX 11.1 compatibility.
According to some recent rumors, the Radeon HD 7950 is expected to arrive on January 31 and will carry a $449 (353 EUR) MSRP.