The cooler, as previously stated is identical to the one which finds itself on the HD7970. With this in mind it should perform even better on the lower specced HD7950. It is a combination of copper base plate with aluminium fin array in a longitudinal pattern. The contact with the core was very good and shouldn't need the GPU paste replacing. All of the memory modules had TIM pads attached along with the VRM.



HEre we get a closer look at the heatsink which is very heavy in comparison to its competitors. Upon closer inspection there is also a metal bracket which is screwed to the main copper/aluminium heatsink to keep the main PCB from bowing under the weight of the cooler.



Stripped of the AMD cooler we see the HD7950 as nature intended. There is nothing too unremarkable to be seen here with the GPU core once again having a nickel plated partial protective shroud. 12x256MB GDDR5 modules surround the main core with the VRM module adjacent to the PCIe power ports and the CHiL regulator below.



The VRM module consists of one less phase with a 4+1 phase design made up of Coiltronics ferrite core lo profile surface mount inductors (1505R1-R12) and an array of Solid capacitors.



We do however see the same CHiL 8228G controller which is good news for overclockers as we will see in the overclocking section, this controller is now supported with MSI's Afterburner utility to adjust both the GPU core and memory voltages.



The 12x256MB GDDR5 hail from HYNIX H5GQ2H24MFA T2C which again is great news as these chips are highly overclockable. Despite the modules already being clocked to a respectable and rated 1250MHZ(5000MHz effective), I have high hopes that they can be clocked further.



Finally we arrive at the heart of the graphics card, the Tahiti Pro. While almost identical to the HD7970 Tahiti XT, the pro version has 256 less Stream Processors with 16 less Texture units. Obviously this equates to less Pixel and Texture fillrate and coupled with the slightly lower clocked memory, performance is due to take a hit. How big of a hit we will examine later in the review.

Let's take a look at today's test setup...