- Date:
- Monday , January 30, 2012
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Share:

AMD Radeon HD 7950 Video Card Review
The new Radeon HD 7950 marks the launch of AMD's more affordable Radeon HD 7900 series GPU. The Radeon HD 7950 is priced to compete with the GeForce GTX 580. We'll look at performance in comparison to several video cards in single-GPU, dual-GPU CrossFireX, Eyefinity, and Overclocking to see where it truly lands.
Power Testing
We tested the power utilization at the wall of the entire system without a video card, and with each video card at idle and full load. For full load power and temperature testing we used real gaming, in this case Battlefield 3. The power supply used in testing is a Enermax MaxRevo 1350W. Our system is very lean with only one optical drive and one hard drive being powered. Total system wattage at idle without video card is 67W.

The AMD Radeon HD 7950 had the lowest Wattage out of the bunch at 84W system total. This is right on par with the new Radeon HD 7970 as well, and a savings over the previous generation Radeon HD 6970. It is also substantially lower than a GeForce GTX 580 at idle.
At full load the Radeon HD 7950 also had the lowest Wattage, demanding less than the previous generation Radeon HD 6970. Impressive to note that performance of the Radeon HD 7950 is greater than that of the Radeon HD 6970, yet it demands less power to do so. It is also a large savings over the GeForce GTX 580.
When looking at CrossFireX, the AMD Radeon HD 7950 CFX again had the lowest idle Wattage at 121W system. We witnessed ZeroCore power working, the second video card was sitting with the fan off at the desktop. This has paid off tremendously; it is much less power than the Radeon HD 6970 CrossFireX. All of our CrossFireX power testing was done with three displays connected and Eyefinity enabled. Keep in mind that in this configuration the memory runs at full speed. Therefore, on a single-display you should see even lower idle Wattage.
At full load once again the AMD Radeon HD 7950 CrossFireX had the lowest system Wattage at 471W. The Radeon HD 6970 CrossFireX pulled 533W, yet Radeon HD 7950 CFX is faster.
Temperature

In what is becoming a pattern, the AMD Radeon HD 7950 had the lowest idle temperature out of the comparison video cards. The Radeon HD 7950 idled at 37c GPU temperature, which was cooler than the Radeon HD 7970 and 6970. Continuing in this manor, the full load temperature was also the coolest at 77c, compared to the HD 7970's 81c and 6970's 90c. Fan noise was at a minimum, we did not notice any fan noise at automatic fan speeds.
