GIGABYTE HD7950 Windforce x3 Review

👤by Richard Weatherstone Comments 📅12-03-12
Overclocking, Temperature & Power Consumption Analysis
Because this is a pre-overclocked card we enter the overclocking arena with trepidation because some overclocked cards are cherry picked, while other cards leave little headroom for tweaking.



The GIGABYTE HD7950 Windforce x3 arrives in a pre-overclocked state and weighs in at a very good 900MHz on the core with no overclock on the 3GB of GDDR5. If past results are anything to go by, the card has plenty of headroom left in the overclocking department so we fired up our favourite overclocking tools with an aim to see just how far we could push the card...



After being assured of excellent cooling (See below), we went straight in for the kill and increased the voltage to the maximum allowed (1300Mv). With this voltage we hoped for some huge overclocks and as you can see above, we were not disappointed.

A 324MHz overclock on the core was quite a phenomenal achievement, beating our previous best HD7950 from Powercolor by 64MHz. Couple this with a stonking overclock on the memory, equating to 1503MHz (6012MHz effective) and GIGABYTE have created something rather special. It must be said that the card was capable of higher overclocks than this but they were not truly stable throughout our testing. They were however capable of some excellent Heaven 2.5 and 3DMark benchmark runs.

Power Consumption
To test for power consumption we do not use anything to technical, just a wall meter which measures the total system power draw minus the monitor.



As expected, with the larger VRM and increased voltages, power consumption of the GIGABYTE HD7950 inevitably takes a hit consuming a eye watering 404w (system) under load. It has to be said that this is still a little less than its main competitor, the GTX570 and quite a lot less than the GTX580.

Temperature

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests, we ran Furmark for 20 minutes, taking the absolute maximum temperature attained.



Having an attractive cooler is all very good and well but if it fails to perform then it will be chastised. Thankfully the Windforce x3 cooler is not just a good performer - it is one of the best we have had the pleasure of using here at Vortez. When you consider the card is pre-overclocked but still manages to outperform many other cards which use a lot less power, you should be impressed. With increased voltages and mammoth overclocks however, we were not impressed, we were astounded at just how well the Windforce cooled. 67c at a 23c ambient is an amazing achievement and testament to just how efficient the cooling on the GIGABYTE HD7950 Windoforce really is.

Let's move on to our suite of benchmarks...

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