Last month we gave AMD's latest flagship
GPU, the AMD Radeon HD 7970 a very rousing review. Following on to that beast
of a card is its little brother, the HD 7950. This time around, however, we're
reviewing ASUS' Direct CUII model, a variant of the HD 7950 that offers some
pretty hardcore cooling solutions for your hardcore game time.
ASUS' Radeon HD 7950
The first thing you'll notice is how ASUS
has removed the stock vapour chamber cooling mechanism and replaced them
instead with a metallic chassis and two 100mm fans. This causes the card to
take up an extra slot in your PC casing's fansink slot, so you may want to
check whether your casing will be able to accommodate this giant.
Where input support is concerned, the HD
7950 has one DVI port, one HDMI 1.4 port and two DisplayPorts catering to your
visual hookup needs. The card is capable of supporting up to three displays,
but if you daisy-chain the DisplayPorts you can make full use of AMD's
Eyefinity technology and have up to six displays simultaneously.
ASUS has done minor tweaks to the HD 7950
to make it a lot more powerful. The processor clock has been upgraded from
800MHz to 900MHz that gives the card some additional graphics boost. Despite
this, the card is inaudible when doing standard and intensive computing tasks.
Similar to that of the HD 7970, the HD 7950
is also capable of performing high definition graphics processing, decoding 4K
resolution videos with relative ease. Running a few simple tests on this card
we found out that the HD 7950 is actually comparable to NVIDIA's GTX 580, and
in some tests it actually outperforms the Fermi-based card.
Whilst powerful, the HD 7950 is also energy
efficient. ZeroCore technology reduces the power usage down to just 3 watts
when not in use, effectively "turning off" the card whenever you're
away.
ASUS AMD Radeon HD 7950
Price $
558.1
Contact
Servex (M) Sdn. Bhd., Build Technology Supply Sdn. Bhd.
Phone (03)
8024 6688, (03) 7955 3699
Info asus.com
Specifications
Chipset:
AMD Radeon HD7950
Core Clock Speed: 900 MHz
Memory Size: 3GB GDDR5
Ratings
Performance 5 stars
Features 4
stars
Cooling 5
stars
Value 3
stars
