AMD Radeon HD 7950 3GB CrossFire Review

The Test System

Before we look at the numbers, let’s take a brief look at the test
system that was used. All testing was done on a fresh install of Windows
7 Ultimate 64-bit and benchmarks were completed on the desktop with no
other software programs running.

The AMD Radeon graphics cards were tested with Catalyst 11.12 beta drivers and all of the NVIDIA graphics cards ran GeForce 290.53 Beta drivers.

Intel X79/LGA2011 Platform

The Intel X79 platform that we used to test the all of the video cards was running the ASUS P9X79 Deluxe motherboard with BIOS 0055 that came
out on 12/16/2011. The Corsair Vengeance 16GB 1866MHz quad channel
memory kit was set to 1866MHz with 1.5v and 9-10-9-27 1T memory timings. The OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD was run with firmware version 2.15.

The Intel X79 Test Platform
Component	Brand/Model	Live Pricing
Processor	Intel Core i7-3960X	Click Here
Motherboard	ASUS P9X79 Deluxe	Click Here
Memory	16GB Corsair 1866MHz	Click Here
Video Card	Various	Click Here
Solid-State Drive	OCZ Vertex 3 240GB	Click Here
Cooling	Intel RTS2011LC	Click Here
Power Supply	Corsair HX850W	Click Here
Operating System	Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit	Click Here

Video Cards Tested:

• AMD Radeon HD 7970 3072MB – 925MHz Core / 1375MHz Memory
• AMD Radeon HD 7950 3072MB – 800MHz Core / 1250MHz Memory
  
• AMD Radeon HD 6990 OC 2048MB – 880MHz Core / 1370MHz Memory
• XFX Radeon HD 6970 2048MB – 880MHz Core / 1375MHz Memory
• MSI Radeon HD 6950 1024MB – 850MHz Core / 1300MHz Memory
• Gigabyte Radeon HD 5870 Super Overclock 1024MB – 850MHz Core / 1200MHz Memory
• ASUS GeForce GTX 590 1536MB – 613MHz Core/1225MHz Shader/855MHz Memory
• EVGA GeForce GTX 580 Classified 3072MB- 855MHz Core/1710MHz Shader/1053MHz Memory
• ASUS GeForce GTX 580 1536MB – 816MHz Core/1632MHz Shader/1002MHz Memory
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 1280MB – 732MHz Core/1464MHz Shader/950MHz Memory
• EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Win 1024MB – 850MHz Core/1700MHz Shader/1002MHz Memory
• MSI GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Core PE 1280MB – 750MHz Core/1500MHz Shader/975MHz Memory
• ASUS GeForce GTX 560 Ti TOP 1024MB – 925MHz Core/1850MHz Shader/1050MHz Memory

AMD Radeon HD 7950 GPU-Z Information:

Notice that at an idle one card is turned off thanks to AMD ZeroCore power and the other is clocked down to 300Mhz on the core and 150MHz on the memory to save power. The idle temperature of the primary card was observed to be 37C on the open air test bench with a room temperature of 22C.