AMD working on HD 7950 GHz Edition to battle the GTX 670

AMD was first to market with their 28nm HD 7970 and HD 7950 graphics cards. Yet Nvidia struck back with the GTX 680 and GTX 670, both better performing cards with similar power consumption. Although AMD’s release of the HD 7970 GHz edition went a long way to reclaiming the single GPU crown from the GTX 680 in the majority of tests, the HD 7950 still lags seriously behind the GTX 670.

Hence AMD is going to pull a similar stunt on the HD 7950 in order to remain competitive with the GTX 670. By applying the HD 7950 with the GHz edition treatment AMD should be able to get the HD 7950 to perform better than a GTX 670, but that will also mean making a HD 7950 GHz edition perform better than the first wave of HD 7970s, something loyal AMD fans who purchased a HD 7970 probably won’t be very happy about.

Although clock speeds have not been speculated or determined, we estimated AMD would need to launch the HD 7950 GHz edition with a core clock of about 1020MHz to get a card that is generally faster than the GTX 670. But this represents a significant step up from the stock 800MHz core clock they currently ship with. We don’t anticipate the memory needs changing at all as the current 5GHz across a 384 bit interface provides ample amounts of bandwidth, but any raising of the memory speeds would be welcomed.

The HD 7950 GHz edition should feature AMD PowerTune and Boost technologies, like they gave the HD 7970 GHz edition, allowing for dynamic clock changing to maintain a particular TDP envelope. The HD 7950 GHz edition is expected later this quarter, hopefully sooner rather than later for AMD’s sake. Given the rather negative feedback AMD recieved on the HD 7970 GHz edition about the stock cooler’s noise output, AMD is expected to issue the HD 7950 GHz edition to its board partners as a non-reference design so they can tame heat and noise output.

Currently the HD 7950 is about £20-£30 cheaper than the GTX 670, but with this tweaking AMD expects to price it comparatively to the GTX 670. Let us know what you think about the HD 7950 GHz edition, is it a smart move from AMD or is it the cheat’s way of boosting performance whilst sacrificing power efficiency?

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