AMD Radeon HD 7950 & XFX R7950 Black Edition Video Card Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

After spending some time with the AMD Radeon HD 7950 we found it to be to be a very capable graphics card that was hands down faster than the AMD Radeon HD 6970/6950 from the previous generation. From our performance numbers it looks like the AMD Radeon HD 7950 should have no problem beating the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 video card and as you saw in our test results it was even able to beat out the EVGA GeForce GTX 580 Classified in a number of benchmarks. The GeForce GTX 580 has come down in price in recent months and can be had for $449.99 for the 1536MB cards and $529.99 for the 3072MB cards. NVIDIA clearly had to lower prices with the launch of the AMD Radeon HD 7900 series as their flagship cards are finally starting to show signs of age. NVIDIA has Kepler coming out in a few more months, so things will certainly get interesting then.

Pricing is crucial these days, so let’s take a look at the prices of the high-end graphics cards.

• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 1536MB – $449.99 after rebate
• AMD Radeon HD 7950 – $449.99 SRP
• EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Win – $519.99
• AMD Radeon HD 7970 – $549.99+ (SRP)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 3072MB – $529.99 after rebate
  
• AMD Radeon HD 6990 – Out of Stock
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 – Out of Stock

The XFX R7950 Double Dissipation Black Edition Overclocked card that we looked at closely in this review was a beast. With a massive 900MHz core clock and a 1375MHz memory clock it performed nearly as fast as the AMD Radeon HD 7970 reference card in a number of benchmarks! For $499.99 it appears that XFX has a winner on their hands as it performed nicely and overclocked with ease. We were able to reach 1030MHz on the core and 1575MHz on the memory with full stability and for a $500 graphics card we were impressed by the performance numbers this card is capable of when overclocked.

We had a number of AMD Radeon HD 7950 graphics cards that arrived in the past week, so expect to see more reviews on the Radeon HD 7950 here on Legit Reviews. We will have a review focused on Radeon HD 7950 CrossFire performance coming shortly that should prove interesting.