AMD Radeon HD 7950 Specs Revealed

Following close on the heels of the Radeon HD 7970 GPU, we have now seen detailed specs for the cut-down Radeon HD 7950. Donanimhaber published some initial information, while a reader at TechPowerup provided detailed specs of an overclocked card from Sapphire. Based on the Tahiti core, this is basically the same core with a few parts disabled, and with a default speed of 800 MHz (approx 14% slower than the Radeon HD 7970).

Still expected on January 31, Radeon HD 7950 will have 1792 Stream Processors and 112 Texture Mapping Units. There will be models with 1.5GB and 3 GB GDDR5, with 384-bit memory bandwidth. The default core speed will be 800 MHz, with the memory speed being 1250 MHz (5000 MHz effective).

There is no reference design for HD 7950 graphics cards, so all available cards will be custom designed. This may provide a double-edged sword for overclockers. There is speculation on some overclocking sites that it may be possible to unlocked the disabled cores, effectively giving an HD 7970, in the same way the HD 6950 could be unlocked to become an HD 6970. On the other hand, for those who use water cooling when overclocking, the non-reference design nature of these cards means water blocks may not be easily available for most cards. As the cards use the same basic core, there should be no reason for them to not run at the same speeds, which also means there are likely to be a lot of overclocked versions available.

Radeon HD 7950 cards are expected to start at approx $100-150 less than Radeon HD 7970, so we can expect to see them from around $400-450.