Introduction

As we started the New Year the last thing I thought I would be looking at was going to be video cards. With the HD 7000 series having been out for around a year now we really thought that the series would've ran its course by now. Quite to the contrary, though, we've seen a bunch of new video cards for partners lately and the launch of the new Tahiti LE based HD 7870.

Today we're checking out one of our favorite models; the HD 7950. While out of the box the model is a little slower than its big brother, the HD 7970, the price point of the model along with the overclocking potential has always been something that we've loved.

The latest one to hit our office comes from PowerColor and is part of the popular PCS line from the company. How does it differ to some of the other video cards we've looked at? Well there's really only one way to find out. As always, though, we've got a couple of things we need to do.

We'll move from here into the package to see what PowerColor is offering us on the box along with its content. Once we've done that it's onto the video card itself to see the cooler we've got along with the connection options before we move onto the specification side of things which today will be slightly expanded as we've decided to overclock this card. Finally we'll check out the testbed and get straight into the testing side of things to see just what kind of performance we're able to get out of the card here today. First, though, let's get into that package and see what's going on.

Package

I love the look of PowerColor boxes recently. They really stand out and look great. You can see we've got the brand and model on the front along with some of the main details. Turning the box over we get a lot more detail into what's going on with the PowerColor HD 7950 3GB PCS.

Across the top part of the box you can see we've got a little bit of information on the PCS system or Professional Cooling System. Across the bottom we get more details including some information on the fans, heat pipes and cooper base. Across the middle of the box we've got some information on the Gold Power Kit which has improved components including Digital PWM, Multi Phase Design and Ferrite Core Choke helping improve power.

Moving inside the box we've got a fairly standard bundle which is ultimately code for a light bundle. Along with the Quick Installation Guide and driver CD we've also got a DVI to VGA connector, CrossFire bridge and Mini DP to DisplayPort connector.