Sapphire HD 7950 3GB OC Pro Reviews

The Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 OC Edition is currently selling for $479.99 USD. That price places it in the upper end of Radeon HD 7950 based video cards, but not at the very top end in terms of price. It is, however, among the fastest clocked video cards of its kind. At its stock speed, the Sapphire HD 7950 OC Edition dominates its similarly-priced competition most of the time. When overclocked, the Radeon HD 7950 is easily capable of challenging the more expensive Radeon HD 7970 in its reference configuration, even if it can't pull out a sound victory. So in terms of performance and value, the Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 OC Edition is well-placed to be a solid entry in the high-end enthusiast gamer's short-list of video card upgrades.

The SAPPHIRE HD 7950 OC Edition is the real McCoy and is the card that other companies need to copy.

CrossFire vagaries aside, Sapphire's Radeon HD 7950 OC is better than reference in every way and well worthy of consideration for a single-GPU system.

This card did perform really well. It posted scores that were able to keep pace with a GTX 580. That’s pretty amazing from a card that isn’t even top of the line. There are still some driver issues that need to be worked out and this is particularly true with multi-card scaling performance. All things considered though this has been a really successful launch for AMD and Sapphire should be very proud of this product and its performance. In conclusion, this is definitely a card to look at if you’re currently in the market for reasonably priced 7950 and you want one that’s built to last. This card is currently selling at about $450.00 + US.

Quite simply this is the only card we'd consider spending cash on if we were looking for a serious GPU upgrade.

With all of that being said, the HD 7950 offers tremendous performance potential if you chose to overclock it. At stock speeds it offers predictable performance that is well ahead of previous generation parts and in just about every game ahead of NVIDIA's current high end parts. As an upgrade, the current pricing puts it in line with the GTX 580 which it of course beats hands down. Add in Eyefinity capabilities with a single card and the HD 7950 is a card that is a perfect upgrade path for those looking for top end performance but have a hard time shelling out $600 for the top line product. Even just less than $500 the HD 7950 is not a value proposition. Performance at stock and overclocked speeds make the XFX Black Edition Double Dissipation and Sapphire Overclocked Edition HD 7950 video card as potent upgrades to enjoy the latest games. Good looks, Custom cooling and PCB, Awesome performance, and more are good enough reasons to move to the HD 7900 series from Sapphire or XFX.

Where the Dual Fan really stands out as unique is in the cooling category. Sapphire has consistently shown that their heatsink engineers are some of the best around and this HD 7950 does nothing but cement that belief in our minds. Not only does the Dual Fan post incredible temperature results at both standard and overclocked speeds but it is almost as quiet at full load as other cards’ idle fan states. The newest member of Sapphire’s Dual Fan family certainly has a lot going for it but some may be turned off by the $30 premium it carries over a reference design. Honestly though, this is a small price to pay for what may be one of the coolest running and quietest cards on the market. The performance increase is just icing on the cake. We really couldn’t have asked for more and this will surely be one of the most popular HD 7950s in the weeks following launch.