HD7950 Top
The HD7950 has the exact same cooler as the HD7970 which is no bad thing considering how well the cooler performed. Sure, it is still noisy on full tilt but the likelihood of the fan ever reaching these levels is minimal unless you have extremely poor case cooling. The card is very attractive being glossy rather than matt this time around and the accentuated curves rather than angular lines make the card look more svelte in form.
Comparison
As you can see, compared to the HD7970 (top most), the HD7950 is identical. Even the markings on the PCB are the same which leads me to suspect that the HD7950's are failed HD7970's having perhaps one or two shader cores malfunctioning. With this in mind it is probably conceivable that the HD7950 can be unlocked to HD7970 as with the 6000 series cards. We will be examining this possibility at a later date with yet another guide on how to do so.
Back
The rear of the card is again, matt black in appearance and again has all of the components exposed rather than shielding them with a backplate. We see that AMD have stuck to the 'X' bracket design to apply adequate pressure from the core to the heatsink with voltage regulation modules also taking place on the rear of the card.
Power Ports
Perhaps the only way to distinguish the HD7970 from the HD7950 to the untrained eye are the power ports of which the HD7950 has twin 6pin PCIe power ports whereas the HD7970 has a 6+8 configuration. MY only hope is that without the additional power available, overclocking og the HD7950 will not be hampered as you will remember that to surpass the 1000MHz mark in our HD7970 review, extra power was needed.
I/O
The I/O area is once again identical with the HD7970 having a DVI port coupled with HDMI 1.4a and twin display ports for eyefinity compatibility of up to four screens.
Vent
The card vents from both interior and exterior drawing cool air in from the fan and expelling it out into the case and rear exhaust ports.
Crossfire Tabs
The card has twin Crossfire Tabs for multiple GPU setups and we also see a return of the BIOS switch allowing a second BIOS chip to be flashed or used as a backup.
Overview
Overall then, the card on the exterior at least is near identical to the HD7950's bigger brother, the HD7970. The only difference being the PCIe power ports and on the rear of the card, a missing VRM. How this translates to performance we will investigate later in the review but for further analysis, take a look on the next page where we strip the card of the cooler to examine the interior of the card...
