Review: Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 OC in CrossFire

by Parm Mann on 31 January 2012, 16:00 4.5

Tags: Sapphire, AMD (NYSE:AMD)

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Overclocking

Sapphire HD 7950 OC single-GPU overclock

Sapphire HD 7950 OC dual-GPU overclock


We've seen AMD's reference design hit 1,150MHz, we've seen XFX's Double Dissipation edition hit 1,160MHz, and now we're seeing Sapphire's Radeon HD 7950 OC go one better at 1,175MHz on the core and 6,000MHz on memory.

Compared to AMD's base specification, that's a 20 per cent boost in memory speed and a massive 47 per cent leap in core speed. We managed to hit such dizzy heights by increasing the card's core voltage from 1.09V to 1.15V, but we didn't need to adjust fan speeds or switch to Sapphire's aggressive second BIOS.

If overclocking is your cup of tea, you'll find AMD's 28nm GPU to be a whole lot of fun. Case in point, we were able to run both cards at the aforementioned speeds without any hint of instability.

With the overclock in place, already-impressive performance in Aliens vs. Predator goes up another notch, or two.