AMD Radeon HD 7950 Released - Prices and Specs

Yesterday (January 31), AMD released the next in their new line of graphics cards for general sale. The Radeon HD 7950 uses a cut-down version of the Tahiti core used in the Radeon HD 7970, released on January 10. With what appears to be 2 different reference designs, one designed to offer superior cooling and the other designed to be quieter.

Of the two reference designs, the cooler option has a fan at the end of the card, pushing cold air through the cooler and out the back of the case. The quieter option has a fan over the GPU, pushing hot air in both directions over the rest of the card. This design also pushes hot air into the case, so is best suited for people who want to run their hardware at stock specifications or with only a mild overclock.

A lot of sites have published information that we posted yesterday. Much of the information can be found in various rumors and reports throughout the internet, so we have a rough picture of what to expect in the coming months:

GPU	HD7990	HD7970	HD 7950	HD 7870	HD 7850	HD 7770	HD 7750
Core Codename	New Zealand	Tahiti XT	Tahiti Pro	Pitcairn XT	Pitcairn Pro	Cape Verde XT	Cape Verde Pro
Release Date	Q2 2012	January 10 2012	January 31 2012	March 2012	March 2012	February 15 2012	February 15 2012
Memory	3072 MB x 2	3072 MB	3072 MB	2048 M	2048 MB	1024 MB	1024 MB
Stream Processors	4096	2048	1792	1408	1280	896	832
Compute Units	64	32	28	22	20	14	13
Texture Units	256	128	112	88	80	56	52
ROP Units	64	32	32	24	24	16	16
Core Clock (MHz)	800	925	800	950	825	900	900
Memory Clock (MHz)	5000	5500	5000	5500	5000	5500	5000
Memory Bus (bits)	384 x 2	384	384	256	256	128	128

Not all the information comes from confirmed sources, but based on various rumors and a little speculation the table above gives a rough overview of what new cards we can expect from AMD this month and next month. All the cards offer DirectX 11.1 and use a GCN core, built on a 28nm process.

Radeon HD 7950 cards typically cost from $449.99 to $499.99 (prices taken from Newegg) at release, with a number of cards ranging from 800MHz to 900MHz core clock available (900 MHz is rumored to be the maximum that AMD officially allow).