Overall and FV
Okay so let’s recap. The XFX R7950 Double Dissipation Black Edition Overclock edition out performs the GTX 580 considerably in most cases, comes close to the performance we saw with the HD 7970 reference card, and has the sexy cooler we loved on their R7970 DD Black Edition. But why should you buy this over the faster R7970 or the reference HD 7970? Well unless you are made of money you are going to have to consider price while picking out the new parts for your PC. In this case the XFX card, like the R7970 that we tested before, costs $50 more than a reference card. That puts its total price at $499, with reference HD 7950’s at $449. A quick look at Newegg shows GTX 580’s running between $469 and just over $500, I think AMD hit the nail on the head for pricing on this card (at least for now). This should hopefully, finally! Push GTX 580 pricing down a little bit but right now that means the R7970 is both cheaper and faster that what Nvidia has to offer. AMD may have cut the Stream Processors down to 1792 from the HD 7970’s 1920, but they didn’t neuter this card completely. It’s not the fastest card on the market, but I’m willing to bet they sell more of them.
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.
