Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 OC 3GB Graphics Card Review

With the 7950’s starting to come in and now that we can start to build up a table of data for direct comparison, the consistent performance gains are coming more and more clear and the consistent slight shortfall behind the 7970 is becoming more apparent as well.

Sapphire have released this as an overclocked variant of the 7950 and with a 100Mhz overclock on the GPU core and nothing on the memory side, one might argue if this is a valued effort. Whilst some will argue that this is not, we also have to consider that Sapphire have got a dual-BIOS arrangement on the card and whilst you can overclock on the primary, the secondary is set to make overclocking easier with higher voltages as standard on the secondary BIOS being the key to this.

Yet again we have seen the 7950 push the benchmarking results that bit further right through our tests.  Even though the overclock offered is a fraction over stock, the card was consistently a shortfall behind the Black Edition Overclock from XFX with its higher out of the box clocks and in a couple of tests nudged itself just past the XFX.

The one area that has shone right through with this card is its cooling.  Even though it uses a heatpipe design rather than a vapour chamber, its ability to keep the card cool under full load is outstanding.  On top of this and even more impressive than the heatsink, are the two fans.  Sapphire have showed us why they are the top dogs with heatsink design and the sound levels offered by the fans took us by surprise.  Even under full load, the fans were barely a whisper louder than what they were at idle and to top this the card was quieter at full load than some others were at idle speeds.  An amazing feat right there.

Sapphire hasn’t gone as far here as pushing the card towards 7970 territory nor have they left it at a reference standing.  The slight overclock that is offered out of the box along with the fantastic cooling and acoustic performance really shows its worth.  Retailing at £412.55, the card is only just under £20 more than Sapphire’s reference clocked 7950 but for this extra few pounds the slight overclock is purely an extra on top of the fantastic cooler that you get instead. And for this reason I’d certainly say that this would be the one to get out of the two.