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.

CES 2012: As we attended the Gigabyte Meet the Executives meeting at CES, Las Vegas, we were comfortably sitting down when a loud knocking came from the next room and the doors opened to be greeted by Marketing Manager of Gigabyte; Colin Brix.

Colin blasted in causing quite a stir as he announced the boards in his hands were that of Intel Z77 origin and were “stolen” from his colleague in the R&D department of Gigabyte.

We were showcased with the G1.Sniper 3, G1.Sniper 3 M3 in Micro ATX form Factor, Z77X-UD5H, Z77X-UD3H and the Mini ITX form factor B75M-D3H in an early state which all support the new Intel Ivy Bridge processor utilising the Z77 platform, but Colin was unable to tell us this, due to restrictions from Intel. Bless him.

As we already know, Ivy Bridge will bring us a lot of new, vital technologies, including full PCI-Express 3.0 technology and native USB 3.0 support for the consumers who are eagerly awaiting for it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

PCI Express 3.0 is relatively new, we currently at the stage where PCI-E 3.0 cards are not really even available on the market and PCI-E 2.0 is still the standard for the mainstream. The company PCI-SIG who make the industry standard connector that is the PCI Express ports have announced they are developing and progressing well with the PCI Express 4.0 interface. PCI-E 3.0 is double the bandwidth of PCI-E 2.0 and so in a logical fashion PCI-E 4.0 is double the bandwidth of PCI-E 3.0. Meaning a PCI-E 4.0 4X slot has the same bandwidth as a PCI-E 2.0 16X slot which is an impressive feat and should mean that bandwidth will no longer be an issue with regards to multi-GPU configurations like it is currently on the Gen2 slots. Although that said currently we very rarely saturate the bandwidth of the PCI-E lane itself it is more the PCI-E controller on the processors and motherboards that is the issue.

PCI-E 4.0 will produce 16GT/s and be physically the same as PCI-E 3.0 (and therefore PCI-E 2.0). There is also a big question “what do we need all this extra bandwidth for?” and currently we do not really have anything that requires that much bandwidth but in future it may be practical. All that said PCI-E 4.0 won’t arrive until 2014 at the earliest and the production costs of it will not differ at all to that of the current PCI-E 2.0 lanes. PCI-SIG also hint that they are working on ways to extract more power efficiency out of PCI-E lanes and meet the “power, cost and compatibility” goals of the future.

Source: Press Release