AMD Releases Second Southern Islands Enthusiast Card: Radeon HD 7950

AMD has today followed-up to its Radeon HD 7970 launch this past December with an option that slots in right beside NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 580, price-wise. With an SRP of $500, the Radeon HD 7950 isn’t inexpensive, but it’s not meant to be. More often than not, it clearly wins in benchmarks when facing the GTX 580, and power consumption wise – there’s just no comparison.

Due to issues we’ve been facing with our GPU test platform, we’ve been unable to finish up our HD 7970 review and will likely combine it with the HD 7950 for a single article when the time comes. We’ll be rebuilding the test platform this week, and hoping that all of the hassles we’ve faced will be gone so that we can move forward. We regret not having a review up by this point, but I can say that you can expect it soon.

Compared to the HD 7970, the HD 7950 lacks little. But that’s to be expected for a card that costs a mere $50 less (from $549). Its core count has been dropped from 2048 to 1792, and its clock speed dropped from 925MHz to 800MHz. Along with this, its GDDR5 speed has also dropped from 1375MHz to 1250MHz.

For those with high-end monitor setups (3×1 or 2560×1600), the HD 7970 looks to be the better buy, given the minimal change in price. But at $500, which places itself beside the 1.5GB GTX 580, AMD does look to offer the more compelling option (especially for those looking to run 3×1 monitors).

The question remains; will NVIDIA’s upcoming Keppler launch rain all over AMD’s parade? We should find out soon enough. While our review cooks in the oven, I’d recommend checking out the review from our friends over at The Tech Report; a great read as always.