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Regular readers will not be surprised to note that HIS are shipping the HD7950 in a long box featuring their traditional ‘sword' imagery. Very bland.
HIS include a Crossfire connector, VGA converter, literature on the installation, and ‘weight lifter'.
HIS have supplied this ‘weight lifter' device before with other products. It is a support base which can hold the discrete card in place close to the PCIe socket. There is no doubt it is an interesting idea, but the HIS HD7950 is quite light and really doesn't need it.
Above: Top row: The HIS HD7950. Second row: The AMD reference HD7950.
Looking closely at the two coolers above, we can see that HIS appear to be using the reference AMD shroud, but have cut a larger hole in a central position. HIS are using a blue PCB, rather than the dark brown reference colour. We will look at the cooler in more detail shortly.
The HIS HD7950 is Crossfire capable in 2, 3 and 4 way configurations. The card features a dual BIOS toggle switch. Setting 1 is the unprotected mode allowing the end user to create their own bios configuration. Setting 2 is the factory default.
The card takes power from two 6 pin PCI e 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. This card can simultaneously output multiple, independent audio streams from the HDMI and mini Displayport connectors at the rear of the card. This GPU supports 3GHz HDMI with frame packing support for Stereo 3D.
Above: Top row: The HIS HD7950. Second row: The AMD reference HD7950.
Now we know why the HIS HD7950 felt so light when we took it out of the box! Most of the shroud is hollow, with the fan mounted directly over a small heatsink in the middle. This really doesn't look (or feel) very impressive.
The AMD reference card we received has the fan offset to the right, with a copper heatsink in the center.
HIS have built the fan into the small heatsink which is positioned centrally. They are using high quality HYNIX GDDR5 memory, and a Chil CHL8228G controller.
The HIS HD7950 is the only card we received today which is supplied at AMD reference clock speeds. The 28nm Tahiti core is clocked at 800mhz and the 3 GB of GDDR5 memory (1250mhz/5000mhz effective) 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.
