Sapphire HD7950 Overlock Edition Crossfire Review

The Sapphire HD7950 Overclock Edition ships in a dramatic box featuring a perky, well endowed army lass, brandishing a machine gun.

Inside, the bundle is extensive. Sapphire have included several power and video converter cables, a disc with software, a Crossfire bridge and HDMI cable. This is the strongest bundle today.

Sapphire are using a custom cooling solution on this card, which is dual fan, and heatpipe based. It is built around a blue PCB.

The Sapphire HD7950 Overclock Edition is Crossfire capable in 2, 3 and 4 way configurations. The card has a dual BIOS switch. The second bios position raises the headroom in Catalyst Control Center for overclocking while setting a more aggressive fan profile.

Like all other HD7950's reviewed today, the Sapphire solution takes power from two six pin power connectors.

The card is a dual slot design with a full sized DVI and HDMI port, and two mini Display Port connectors. It is Eyefinity capable and can power up to 6 displays. The solution can simultaneously output multiple, independent audio streams from the HDMI and mini Displayport connectors at the rear of the card. The GPU can support 3GHz HDMI with frame packing support for Stereo 3D.

The Sapphire card uses a plate underneath which is positioned to transfer heat from various components on the board, including the memory. This is cooled directly from the two fans above.

Sapphire are using a quality cooler on this specific model, comprised of 5 thick heatpipes which are attached to several racks of aluminum fins on either side of the copper core block.

The Sapphire card uses HYNIX GDDR5 memory and a Chil CHL8228G controller.

Sapphire have overclocked the core from 800mhz to 900mhz, but haven't decided to increase memory speeds, holding at 1250mhz (5,000 mhz effective). The memory is connected via a 384 bit memory interface. The card is equipped with 32 ROPS and 1792 unifed shaders, which is down from 2048 on the higher cost HD7970.

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