As we all know last Tuesday was the official release date for AMDs 7950 graphics cards. We’ve already taken a look at one of the offerings from XFX, but now its Sapphires turn to take centre stage and show us what they can do to spice up the reference design to their tastes.

The 7950 that Sapphire have sent us to tinker with is their Radeon HD 7950 Overclocked Edition. Fresh out of the Sapphire factories, we see this card launched with a 100Mhz overclock on the GPU core, giving it the right to display the OC label, but more crucially we see a remake of a heatpipe cooler design rather than a vapour chamber arrangement that is appearing more and more from other manufacturers.

With the 7950 OC coming to us at a slightly closer reference level when comparing to the XFX Black Edition Overclocked that we looked the other day, naturally we expect it to perform in a similar manner and being very close to reference point, which we can get a feel for what a more stock like card can do in rivalry to its bigger brother; the 7970.

Overclocking and processing performance aside, the basis behind this card is to do with the cooler and how it performs under load and more so when the end user takes it and overclocks it themselves to the next level. Its how it will perform then that matters. And that is what we are hoping to see as we go through our testing.

With the 7950 official launch day being yesterday, we made sure to have a look at at least one card for launch to get the juices flowing, and now we can sit back and figure out how we can show different angles of this new GPU with its new technology.

This includes seeing how far things overclock, and of course obtaining more cards to show off the potential behind the 7950 cards in CrossFireX.

This will all come in due course, but for now, we were more interested to see what some of AMD’s other partners have come up with in terms of a custom 7950 and our prayers were answered when the Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 OC landed with us. With an overclocked core clock speed of 900MHz and a custom cooler design, we’re very hopeful that this card can compete with the already mind-blowing XFX 7950 Black Edition that we already looked at.

For now, we thought that we’d give you a brief look at the card and its design and aesthetics, before we delve in and show you some of the performance figures behind it.

For more information, we will be publishing a fully written review showcasing the extensive benchmarks and tests, whilst looking at the card in a lot more detail, but for now; enjoy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

With the release of the 7970 now passed and the cards making their way out into the big wide world, now is time for AMDs partners to release the slightly toned down version of their jaw dropping card. When we took a look at the 7970 reference card, we was astounded by the power that had been laid in front of us in the form of a single GPU format. The card took all of our test methodology in its stride and barely showed strain at any point – and this was purely a reference card before any of the partners were able to get their labs on the case and tweek them to their own recipes.

The 7950 is built around the same ‘Tahiti’ core as the 7970 but mainly its clocks speeds will be lower at stock. With the 7950 now though the workshops of AMDs partners, now we can really get a feel of what this card can do. XFX have made the push and have made it first to the eTeknix test bench, but with no standard card by far. What we have here to play with is their 7950 Black Edition Overclocked 3Gb card.

The 7950 as one would guess is at the more eco and budget friendly end of the spectrum in comparison to the 7970 and the 7990 when it comes to launch, so is there a huge compromise to be made by saving money or is it still going to thrash the pants off the 6950 and even dare I say it the GTX 580 as well? Well rumour has it that with the right tweeks, the 7950 will easily overclock to and perform at 7970 levels. So would this card be a timely investment or should we still look at the 7970 for its pure processing power?

With AMD releasing the Radeon HD 7950 today, we all knew that things would go a bit differently from when the 7970 launched back in December. The 7970 saw a reference launch with partners bringing out refreshed cards later down the line. The 7950 however was destined to see specialist models being released at launch including custom coolers and overclocked editions.

Today we take a look at the XFX Radeon HD 7950 Black Edition Overclocked 3GB graphics card which offers up a double dissipation cooler which XFX are famous for, as well as being overclocked past its stock speeds and being included in the Black Edition range of products.

Black Edition allows the components to be of the very best quality including a hand-picked custom GPU that is known to surpass certain limits in terms of overclocking.

Whilst this video review offers more of an aesethicc look at the card, we have all of the benchmarks in our full written review which offers a more technical look at things, and in a bit more detail. The video review gives a further look into the styling and design behind the card with our personal opinion on the card from a first glance.

Click here to view the embedded video.

With the 7000 series due to launch soon, and due to us having our hands tied, we can only say soon, meaning sometime in the next 365 days, but it could be sooner rather than later. With this new released eventually coming, we still find that the 6000 series is remaining steady and still going strong with the main contenders really being the Radeon 6850 and 6950 and of course not forgetting the 6970 flagship single GPU card.

With these cards being out a while now, a lot of manufacturers have been giving them a bit of a refresh by adding in extra features and added functionality. We saw this with the Sapphire 6970 FleX BF3 edition card that we looked at recently, which included a variety of technologies directly from Sapphire themselves. One of these technologies involved their fantastic cooling solution, which utilised a vapor chamber design known as the patented Vapor-X technology that has over time made Sapphire famous.

Today we find ourselves with another similar card that’s had the Vapor-X treatment, as well as a nice overclock. We introduce you to the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 Vapor-X OC graphics card, which gives a slightly faster clock and memory speed and improved cooling to handle the overclock in a quiet and effecient manner as we’d expect from a market leader such as Sapphire.

With that all taken care of, let’s get straight into the packaging to see what’s on offer, as Sapphire usually take care of you when it comes to the bundled accessories, so let’s see if the 6850 Vapor-X OC sticks with that philosophy.

We all knew that AMD were going to launch the 7000 series graphics cards, but not many anticipated that it would be quite this soon, with AMD bringing the date forward from the 9th January 2012 to 22nd December 2011.

By AMD bringing the date forward, the major downside to this is that it doesn’t give us much time as writers to get you the very best content possible, as we have to aim to test the card to its full capacity in a limited time frame, so that we’re ready for launch.

That aside, we are pleased to tell you that the 7000 series is here, or at least the 7970 is, with a reference design, while 7950 and 7970 partner cards will still be launched on 9th January 2012, so be sure to look out for that one. Not a lot of information was leaked about the 7970, but if previous card launches were anything to go by, we had a feeling that this could go horribly wrong and we say that for two main reasons. Generally when AMD launch a graphics card, they forget a vital thing, and that is to actually have the cards to launch. That involves making sure the reviewers have the cards, and so that stock is plentiful in stores and sadly this has happened again, but without digressing too much, we find one major flaw that tends to hiccup every time; rebadging.

When we’ve seen cards launch before, we’ve typically seen a bit of a rehash of an older card, much like we saw with the 5770/6770 and 5850/6850 and generally when they have launched, the performance has been slightly worse, so you can understand our downward view when we heard about the 7970.

From looking at the architecture however, it does seem that this card is a little bit different with a completely new GPU core and new technologies to back it up, and I can honestly say, from a first glance, it does seem as though AMD are learning from their mistakes.

The new GPU, codenamed “Tahiti” is part of the “Southern Islands” range of graphics cores and is now currently dubbed as their flagship graphics card with the 7970. Other cards are due to be released in the near future and with January 9th becoming ever so close to the present, we should see the 7970 being customised with different coolers and unique overclocks, but for now, let’s take a look at the reference Radeon 7970 from AMD.

]]> http://www.eteknix.com/reviews/graphics/amd-radeon-hd-7970-3gb-graphics-card-review/feed/ 0 http://www.eteknix.com/reviews/graphics/club3d-radeon-hd-6950-battlefield-3-edition-graphics-card-review/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=club3d-radeon-hd-6950-battlefield-3-edition-graphics-card-review http://www.eteknix.com/reviews/graphics/club3d-radeon-hd-6950-battlefield-3-edition-graphics-card-review/#comments Fri, 23 Dec 2011 04:27:11 +0000 Andy Ruffell http://www.eteknix.com/?p=13696

Dubbed one of the most highly anticipated games of the year, Battlefield 3 saw pre-orders galore and when it finally arrived, a lot of consumers were sadly let down by their systems, with the intense game needing a lot more juice than first expected.

This gave graphics card manufacturers the chance to revamp a card, add new features or even just bundle in the game for good measure.

The Radeon 6950 is classed as one of the best bang for buck cards on the market, giving a good balance of performance while keeping a few pennies in the bank at the same time. Due to this, it instantly became a hit with consumers and they flocked out to buy them in abundance.

Today we have a Radeon HD 6950 from our good friends at Club3D. It may look standard, but it is basically identical to their patented CoolStream card, but comes with Battlefield 3 included. CoolStream is the cooling technology behind Club3D’s graphics cards, and as we’ve seen in other reviews of their cards, it really is a great cooling solution, so we’re eager to see how this card performs.

2011 has been a big year for gaming with the releases of Batman: Arkham City, Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3 and Skyrim to name but a few and getting good quality graphics comes with a price and you can always go one better in the hope of getting the best possible graphics.

AMD and their partners believe in getting the best possible gaming experience through use of Eyefinity, but this can also come at a cost when you start to break it down. You’ll first and foremost, need a card that is capable, three or more monitors and the technology behind it all.

Many cards on the market have two DVI ports, a HDMI and two DisplayPort connectors, which depending on your configuration, could lead to you purchasing some expensive monitors, or some DisplayPort hubs which are quite pricey in their own right. The other option involves purchasing active dongles, but at around £50 a pop, this can also work out costly.

Sapphire started to address this problem by introducing their FleX range of cards, which do the job aboard the card so you don’t have to shell out extra cash. FleX allows you to run three monitors running on DVI independently, without the need for any high priced extras or dongles.

Sapphire have now decided to bring their FleX technology to the Radeon HD 6450 to offer consumers a low cost Eyefinity solution for users on a budget. Whilst it’s not the fastest card on the market, it will allow you to immerse yourself into the game further, so let’s take a look to see what it’s all about.

Evga were originally founded in 1999 and are focussed towards lots of different markets, including the system builder, distribution and of course, the retail sector. Whilst they have a lot of product ranges which including graphics, motherboards, displays, peripherals and much more, we want to focus more on the VGA side of their business today.

The graphics card market is taken up by two major brands, as we know. AMD and Nvidia are both rival competitors and both have their merits as well as their not so great points, but that’s for another article. AMD and Nvidia both produce the GPU core, whilst their partners produce the coolers and the rest of the technology based around it.

The cooler generally consists of various components that are built from the ground up to offer a silent and efficient solution to keeping the graphics card cool. We find a lot of manufacturers utilising a copper heat-pipe design with a large fan to exhaust the hot air out towards the rear of the card, whilst others are manufacturing cards with water cooling type designs. We’ve even see types of cards with both style coolers, which looks like some kind of science experiment gone wrong.

How the design of the card looks is entirely up to the partner, and we’ve seen some seriously hideous designs in the past, whilst others are simply beautiful. The only cards that look the same are the reference cards from AMD and Nvidia which simply have a branded sticker on them, but that’s all down to the GPU manufacturer’s and the way that they wanted things launched.

Now we’re not going to mention about the war between AMD and Nvidia, as we said, they both have their good and bad points, and that’s all down to personal opinion at the end of the day, and whilst some vendors such as Asus and Club3D cater for both AMD and Nvidia, others such as Evga focus on just one brand; Nvidia in this instance.

With lots of rumours about AMD and Nvidia releasing new cards in 2012, we find a lot of graphics card manufacturers clinching on to the life of the current cards and trying to spice things up to give a breath of fresh air to an already old card.

The 6970 isn’t exactly old, as it’s still very current, but with a fast paced industry like this one, technology is old before its even been released. This is down to the manufacturer’s starting the thought process on its sucessor already, even at the early stages, and that’s a good thing, as it keeps the tech fast moving and invites new things to be brought to the table.

To give a certain range of cards a slight edge, we see vendors giving it an overhaul in terms of cooling, or giving a slight bump to the clock speeds or even adding their own technology to the PCB, or sometimes even doing a combination which is what we’ve seen with the FleX series of cards from Sapphire.

FleX offers a custom Vapor-X cooler design, as well as incorporating their technology which offers a FleXible solution to multiple monitor configurations, especially with Eyefinity being the new hot way to game at the moment.

Today we’re looking at a 6970 FleX card with a difference, as it includes the fancy Vapor-X cooler, the FleX technology, but is overclocked too and even comes with Battlefield 3 to get you gaming in no time. You can’t really ask for much more, especially on a high-end card, much like this one.

We’re really interested to see how this limited edition card performs in our tests, as from the offset, it seems to offer the whole package.

In a crazy world where power is everything, whether it be cars or computers, being top is always key and as we find bills rising, especially gas and electricity. For us enthusiasts, that is a really bad thing, as we generally run our systems 24/7 and have the most power hungry components being stressed all day, every day. The bad thing with this is with prices going up, mainly for electricity, it means we’ll be faced with some tough decisions to make over the coming months in relation to our computer hardware.

Luckily you have some options as to how you’re going to deal with it. You can either go down the route of getting a similar based laptop which generally runs less power than the desktop equivalent but doesn’t obviously offer the same kudos points or have the same sense of style. The other option is of course, by us looking at downgrading certain components, but that wouldn’t class you as an enthusiast any more, though would it? This would mean looking at the main power hungry components which generally would be the motherboard, processor and most importantly; the graphics card.

Club 3D believe they have the solution to all of these problems with their “Green Edition” range of cards which feature ultra-efficient components and a compact design which uses less power and of course less heat, which is a win win situation in our books. Whilst we’ve seen other brands try this before, it generally happened to slightly lower end cards, and defeated the whole object overall of offering a more efficient card.

Club 3D have decided to give their GTX 560Ti the “Green Edition” treatment, which to this date is still considered an extreme card by all standards, and is more than worthy of this “Green Edition” overhaul which leads to a silent, low power operation while not skimping on the high performance than the GTX 560Ti offers to start with.

This is the first card we’ve got hold of from Club 3D, and we’re extremely keen to see how it compares in our tests, especially when looking at the benefits of the cooler, components used and of course how it performs when looking at benchmarks and more importantly; power consumption.

To avoid no more delay, let’s take a look at what’s on offer from Club 3D with the GTX 560Ti Green Edition graphics card…

Unless you really do have your ear to the ground, you may be unaware as to who VTX3D are. VTX3d or Vertex 3D are a brand that have been brought to the market by the TUL Corporation, which you may or may have not noticed from the uncanny styling that’s similar on both ranges of cards, is the parent company of leading graphics card manufacturer PowerColor.

VTX3D have been launched to offer the same products as PowerColor but with a slight difference, and that’s the price. They have been deemed to be the “price aggressive” department of TUL Corporation, which is great for the consumer as it passes the savings on but still remains to give you great performance and good quality, all at the same time.

One of the hottest selling cards around is the Radeon HD 6850 which offers one of the best price/performance ratios that we’ve ever seen in the history of AMD graphics cards. VTX3D have adopted this by creating their very own version; the X-Edition HD 6850. X-Edition is VTX3D’s way of showing what they can do with a 6850 being added to the mix against the big contenders such as Asus and Sapphire but with slightly overclocked speeds so it will be interesting to see how this value concious brand copes with our new and improved testing procedures for graphics cards.

The card certainly offers a unique looking design and seems to include all of the features that we’d expect from a Radeon HD 6850, and as it’s a new brand to us, we’re extremely keen to see how things go, so let’s get straight into it and see what makes this card tick.

The graphics card world is at a certain point that we see every year, where it seems AMD and Nvidia seem to go into hibernation and no new products get released. This is where the partners of each GPU manufacturer start tweaking and generally going crazy themselves to offer something unique to the public. We’ve seen it from many brands as of late with specialist cards that give the market that sudden jolt back to life and more importantly get people talking and buying.

Now we are primarily quite big fans of AMD based graphics cards here at eTeknix, and our graphics review section shows exactly that, but from time to time we do take a look at what Nvidia have to offer and we will generally go for the top-end cards on the market as we’re not big fans of the “run-of-the-mill” type products.

Today is no exception to that rule as Asus has given us the chance to take a look at their Matrix GeForce GTX 580 Platinum 1536MB graphics card. Simply put, a card that is set to break certain boundaries in terms of cooling performance and general styling presence. In terms of styling, it seems that the ROG team have gone all out and have given the card the fast food diet in the hope of bulking it up and giving it some unique features and fancy buttons but is it all as clear cut as that?

Not just looking at how this card compares against AMD based cards, but we will also be pitting it directly against some other similar GTX 580 cards that we’ve looked at before, but first, why don’t we take a look at what the ROG team have done in terms of the packaging.

Graphics cards are a funny thing, because we end up with AMD and Nvidia constantly competing and releasing new models of GPU’s left right and centre and then suddenly we see nothing. The only products that end up being released are revamped versions of older cards, but that’s not to say they aren’t any good, as that couldn’t be further from the truth.

This is where Sapphire enter the game as they are always keen on promoting their product ranges which are specific to different consumers and aimed at suitable markets. The FleX range of cards are aimed at users wanting the very best, for the very best price and with multiple screen configurations in mind. Now when we say multiple screen configurations, we’re well aware that AMD have that sown up with Eyefinity, but Sapphire have harnessed that technology and tweaked it slightly to offer a five screen setup using this one card and more importantly, without the need for expensive DisplayPort monitors that can cost an absolute fortune; especially when buying five of them.

This is where Eyefinity fails to be frank as a typical triple monitor Eyefinity arrangement generally requires one of the outputs to be a DisplayPort which leaves the user purchasing one of the expensive monitors or an active dongle which in its own right can be quite pricey. The FleX range of cards gets around that by changing things up, but it doesn’t just give you different display outputs, but offers so much more.

Being part of the FleX range also gives it the style treatment with a unique cooler and overall design on their range of cards and this can lead to added performance, quietness and of course thermal efficiency.

With the Radeon HD 6950 being one of the top cards at the moment considering its overall price vs performance outweighing any of the competition, Sapphire felt the need to give it the FleX treatment with a variety of display outputs and the sheer compute power that we’ve come to love from the 6950 based card, but how well does it work when it all comes together? We got hold of one of the cards so that we could find out first hand, for ourselves.