Tahiti Gets Clipped

It has been just over a month since we first got our hands on the AMD Southern Islands architecture in the form of the Radeon HD 7970 3GB graphics card.  It was then a couple of long weeks as we waited for the consumer to get the chance to buy that same hardware though we had to admit that the $550+ price tags were scaring many away. Originally we were going to have both the Radeon HD 7970 and the Radeon HD 7950 in our hands before January 9th, but that didn't pan out and instead the little brother was held in waiting a bit longer.

Today we are reviewing that sibling, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB GPU that offers basically the same technology and feature set with a slightly diminished core and a matching, slightly diminished price.  In truth I don't think that the estimated MSRP of $449 is going to really capture that many more hearts than the $549 price of the HD 7970 did, but AMD is hoping that they can ride their performance advantage to as many profits as they can while they wait for NVIDIA to properly react.  

Check out our video review right here and then continue on to our complete benchmarking analysis!!

Southern Islands Gets Scaled Back a Bit

As I said above, the Radeon HD 7950 3GB is pretty similar to the HD 7970.  It is based on the same 28nm, DirectX 11.1, PCI Express 3.0, 4.31 billion transistor GPU and includes the same massive 3GB frame buffer as its older brother.  The Tahiti GPU is the first of its kind of all of those facets but it has a few of the computational portions disabled.

If you haven't read up on the Southern Islands architecture, or Tahiti GPU based around it, you are missing quite a bit of important information on the current lineup of parts from AMD.  I would very much encourage you to head over to our Radeon HD 7970 3GB Tahiti review and look over the first three pages as it provides a detailed breakdown of the new features and the pretty dramatic shift in design that Southern Islands introduced to the AMD GPU team.  

Continue reading our full review of the Radeon HD 7950 3GB graphics card!!

Q4-2012 In a Nutshell

Tis the reporting season.  Yes, that time of year when some of the major players in the computing world get together and tell us all how well they did this past quarter.  Ok, so they do not necessarily get together to announce results, but they sure time them that way.  Today was AMD’s turn (and Apple’s), and the results were not nearly as positive as what Intel had to offer a few days ago.

Q4 2011 was flat in terms of revenue as compared to Q3.  The company had gross revenue of $1.69 billion and had a net income loss of $177 million.  That net income is not necessarily a bad result, but more on that later.  Margins rose to 46%, which is still a far cry from Intel’s 65% for the past quarter.  Gross revenue was up 2% from last year, which considering the marketplace and Intel’s dominance, is a solid win for AMD.

When we start talking about non-GAAP results, AMD had a net income of $138 million.  The difference between those two numbers (a loss vs. a nice profit) is that the loss came from one time writeoffs.  AMD has lowered its stake in GLOBALFOUNDRIES to 8.8%, and in so doing incurred a hefty charge.  This is not so much money lost as it is lost value in the company.

Click to read the rest of this article here.

Retail-ready HD 7970

We first showed off the power of the new AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB graphics card in our reference review posted on December 22nd.  If you haven't read all about the new Southern Islands architecture and the Tahiti chip that powers the HD 7970 then you should already be clicking the link above to my review to get up to speed. Once you have done so, please return here to continue.

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Welcome back, oh wise one.  Now we are ready to proceed.  By now you already know that the Radeon HD 7970 is the fastest GPU on the planet, besting the NVIDIA GTX 580 by a solid 20-30% in most cases.  For our first retail card review we are going to be looking at the XFX Black Edition Double Dissipation that overclocks the GPU and memory clocks slightly and offers a new cooler that promises to be more efficient and quieter.  

Let's put XFX to the test!

The XFX Radeon HD 7970 3GB Black Edition Double Dissipation

Because of the use of a completely custom cooler, the XFX HD 7970 Black Edition Double Dissipation looks completely different than the reference model we tested last month though the feature set remains identical.  The silver and black motif works well here.

Continue reading our review of the XFX Radeon HD 7970 3GB Black Edition Double Dissipation!!