AMD HD 7950 Reviews Comment Thread

[Mathus]

Sweet, that could work as well. I wonder how long it would take for them to ship it to me, thanks for the link!

[great_big_abyss]

Damn, that is a sweet deal for that windforce!!!!

[Bond007]

Originally Posted by MonsterSound

Don't forget you can PM NCIX
$453.91 - Gigabyte Radeon HD 7950 Windforce 900MHZ w free shipping
$451.88 - MSI Radeon HD 7950 OC 830MHZ
$449.28 - Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 800MHZ

Windforce looks pretty good at $454 w free shipping

That windforce is definitely an excellent deal. Nice find.

[NyteOwl]

Now if only they had proper Linux/BSD drivers available at product launch ... :(

[Mathus]

I picked up the gigabyte 7950 windforce overclock and have been loving it, I can't believe what an improvement it made over my old 4870.

Thanks for the link on the $450 price Bond 007, I was able to price match at memory express and got it for $460 tax in :D

[Mathus]

I have to say, I am LOVING how quiet and cool my Gigabyte 7950 is. I have the GPU pinned at 99% and the temp is only 56 C with fan speed at 39% :D This is with a stock OC on the card where the GPU is running at 900mhz. I would highly recommend this card to anyone looking to get a 7950, it's smaller than the other OC model cards at 10.5" and it looks to be the cheapest as well.

[NyteOwl]

Add in the reduced power consumption, cooler operation (and resultant quieter operation) and the 7950 stand a good bit taller.

[Mathus]

the lack of CUDA is rather sad but I thought that Adobe also supported AMD's app acceleration in photoshop, premiere pro so you shouldn't be missing any performance in that department. I went for the 7950 b/c it was usually faster than the 580 for cheaper, less heat, noise and power. Overall there was no contest in my mind.

[artistpavel]

Photoshop is using Open GL, so both cards can work, but the Mercury Engine in Premier Pro is CUDA only, at least until they maybe start supporting Open CL in CS6, once all this gets sorted out then it will be an even playing field for AMD and Nvidia, I hate to be stuck with Nvidia, just because there's more support for CUDA.

Speaking of Premier Pro, a good CPU can handle it just fine without hardware acceleration, but it's just neat to have it.

[JMCD]

I bought an MSI 7950 that has a similar looking cooler to the HIS in this review. I am very unimpressed with the cooler it came with. Upon removing the shroud I found the cooler that looks exactly like this http://www.u-sm.ru/images/stories/ar...50_cooler2.jpg

Basically, it is a very cheap cooler with very little dissipation area. My card runs at about 80-85C with the fan speed hovering between 50-55% (which is really where it begins to get annoying). I'd highly recommend everyone to avoid this type of cooler, it sucks. To be sure, I removed it and reapplied the thermal paste and only gained a few degrees of improvement.