Our Test Rig
Asus Rampage IV X79 Motherboard
Seagate Constellation 2tb Hard drive
Cooler Master Gold Series 1200 Watt PSU
http://www.highspeedpc.com/ Test Bench
Kingston 1600Mhz DDR3 Quad Channel Ram
Kingston Hyper X 120 SSD’s in Raid 0
With AMD’s new HD 7970’s rocking the boat slightly with both price and performance it’s about time we started to see the slow trickle of GPU’s that will fill in the rest of the HD 7000 series video cards. First on the list is the HD 7950, a card that a lot of people have been waiting for because of the high price of the HD 7970. There is no doubt that it’s not going to outperform the HD 7970, but how will this new card compare to the GTX 580? Today I’m not taking a look at a reference card, we have skipped directly to the XFX Double Dissipation Black Edition Overclocked version, similar in design to what we saw with their R7970.
I dont know where the truth lies on this but I expected a reaction from Nvidia to the 7950 launch, most probably an announcement of the upcoming GPU's with a launch schedule, or simply a price cut.
The launch of 7950 is clearly a bigger threat to gtx580 than that of 7970. And this due to the fact it counters it at a lower price point with the added bonuses of 3gb ram and o/c Headroom.
The silence of Nvidia is deafening.
A pesimist would say that the company appears to be in a state of shock and denial.
Avoiding announcements for the products (while competition runs rampant) is clearly a demonstration of the product's immaturity.
Avoiding price cuts can be explained as a desperate effort to deny defeat in the performance sector, since there will be no swift replacement of the current products with new better performing ones. Thus the organization assumes, a "continue as usual stance", in order not to alert the stock markets, which would definitely be alerted if the current product line was devaluated with no obvious release schedule for a new "soon to come" GPU line.
Moreover if the info about Gtx 580 not being produced is true, a price cut could lead to supply problems and make the new product's absence even more visible.
