Final thoughts and rating
If you liked AMD's Radeon HD 7950, you'll absolutely love Sapphire's custom-cooled and factory-overclocked derivative.
Available at launch for a £25 premium, the OC variant improves on AMD's reference design by increasing performance, lowering noise levels, drastically reducing temperatures and widening the gap between itself and the long-in-the-tooth GeForce GTX 580.
The 7950 is the more refined card in various ways, but it does fall short in one area; dual-GPU scaling. At the time of writing, AMD's drivers struggle to deliver the required amount of dual-GPU performance in a range of popular titles, and if multiple graphics cards are your preferred weapon of choice, you may find real-world performance to be mixed.
Bottom line: CrossFire vagaries aside, Sapphire's Radeon HD 7950 OC is better than reference in every way and well worthy of consideration for a single-GPU system.
The Good
Excellent single-card performance
Overclocks like a dream
Quieter than reference
Cooler than reference
The Bad
CrossFire scaling can be hit or miss
HEXUS Rating
Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 OC
HEXUS Awards
Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 OC
HEXUS Where2Buy
The Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 OC is available to purchase from ebuyer.com and scan.co.uk*.
HEXUS Right2Reply
At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.
*UK-based HEXUS community members are eligible for free delivery and priority customer service through the SCAN.care@HEXUS forum.
