Hey gurus, hoping you could offer me some advice please. I want to purchase a Radeon 7950 to replace my troublesome SLI config, and reduce the noise and temps associated with running two cards. Since buying the SLI setup, my PC has moved from a well ventilated spare room down into the lounge and into a semi-HTPC state behind the TV, with only occasional gaming. Problem is in its new locale the noise and temps are unbearable, some times each GPU is at least 20 'centigrade' warmer in the lounge... no joke! Its not a decision based on performance... really, but I fancy taking a look at AMD and the 7950 I am looking at is an XFX model at £220, and has the headroom to overclock if I need the performance. I could sell the 2x570s and at least break even. What do you think?
If you're wanting to reduce noise, temps and power draw it could be a good idea. You'd probably see some performance gains also if SLI is giving you problems. I wouldn't buy that XFX card however, throw the extra £15 down and get the Sapphire TwinX. Do you really need a high end card, though? If you're not gaming much, what sort of games do you play? It might serve you better to get something a little cheaper.
Thats what I figured. I looked at the XFX as its within my budget (difficult to explain GPU purchases to the wife) and I was going to whack on an aftermarket cooler in a couple of months. Also I could pick it up from a shop on the way home tonight... which is very appealing. In terms of gaming, Its a bit of Two Worlds 2, Hitman, AC3, Crysis 2(MaldoHD) and Freelancer at the moment @ 1920x1080. Probably depends on the games that come bundled too. I figured the extra VRAM would help to venture into some new AA modes and I always loved Radeon IQ and video playback.
Yeah I think it'll be a good purchase, but not sure about the XFX one though, something else as Dark suggested, either TwinX, VaporX or Gigabyte would be a bit better choice perhaps. But if you look up reviews / newegg / amazon whatever for that particular card then yeah sure.
from what I've read about that xfx 7950 it's bad, people are wondering how xfx could produce a cooler that is louder and runs hotter than the reference one. are you buying from novatech in Reading? I got my gigabyte hd 7950 from there. it was £244. have a look on their website and ring the Reading shop, they can get it in overnight for you. or a different 7950.
I picked up the XFX from Novatech. Did a ASIC check and its 88%, which doesn't seem too bad for the price. After letting it run for a couple of hours I stuck the GPU on 950Mhz and memory 1475Mhz and ran Valley for an hour, with no problems or artifacts. Will leave it here for a few weeks then I will look at tweaking it some more. Stepping down from a very hot SLI config I notice a massive decrease in temps across the board, so I have managed to dial down all system fans and the two scythes on my Noctua to low. Needless to say, but its now whisper quiet on idle/browsing and significantly quieter then even a single GTX570 under load. Performance wise, its pretty darn good for a single card, Hitman Absolution sits around 45-60fps @ Ultra (4xMSAA+FXAA), which is about what I was expecting. 2D IQ and Video playback is amazing, didn't have to tweak anything to achieve full RGB, which was a problem before. 3D IQ is more or less the same, which was surprising. I always though ATIs had better colours and contrast, but it seems NVIDIA caught them up. Missions accomplished, so thanks for the advice gurus.
I was in novatech store in reading yesterday as well lol. did see the xfx 7950 on display. glad you got everything running well, I'm sure you can easily get 1000/1500 out of at least. enjoy, 7950 are great cars. also, I have to say I'm impressed with the cooling on my gigabyte 7950. coming from a thermalright shaman on my previous gpu I was worried about noise but the card is inaudible and runs super cool.
Good man. I work in Bracknell and live in Reading, so its only a 10min detour on the drive home, so pretty much ideal. I have used Novatech for 13 years, and even used to travel down to the original Portsmouth store for a change of scenery. Will let you know how the next stage of overclocking goes.
There's a lot of solid coolers around for cards today, luckily the 7950's have a good share of them. I remember it being not so long ago that you had to go out and buy third party cooling solutions and fit them yourself if you wanted really good temps/noise levels. That or jury rig an old CPU heatsink to your graphics card, which while ugly often worked brilliantly. There was a bit of a trend of people doing that at one point.
