AMD has finally released Radeon HD 7950, which happens to be the cut-down version of the Radeon HD 7970 graphics card that hit the streets on January 9th, 2012. The AMD Radeon HD 7950 graphics card is based on the same ‘Tahiti’ core architecture that is used on the Radeon HD 7970, but some has less features and lower clock speeds.

The AMD Radeon HD 7950 is internally codenamed ‘Tahiti Pro’ and features a core clock speed of 800MHz (13.5% slower than the Radeon HD 7970) with 1792 stream processors and 112 texture units. AMD did keep the 3GB of GDDR5 memory on a 384-bit bus, but is lowering the clock speed down to 1250MHz (5000 MHZ effective). Since the card has fewer cores and lower clock speeds the board power is down by 20% to just 200 Watts and the price has also been slashed. The suggested retail price of the AMD Radeon HD 7950 base design is $449, which is $100 less than the AMD Radeon HD 7970. With a 20% price slash and performance down around 15% this card should appeal to gamers on a budget.

AMD sent over a reference card for us to test, but they went on to say that no one would be offering the reference design. We don’t see the point of spending a ton of time talking about a card that no one will ever be able to buy, so we will focus on the first retail AMD Radeon HD 7950 card that arrived for testing. We aren’t sure about how unlocking cores is going to work with no standard design, so at this point in time we are unsure if it is possible to unlock a 7950 and turn it into a 7970.

XFX was the first company to send us a card, so we’ll focusing on their card in this review. We’ll include the AMD Radeon HD 7950 reference card numbers though as they do make for a good baseline score.

• READ MORE (Source): AMD Radeon HD 7950 & XFX R7950 Black Edition Video Card Review – AMD & XFX Radeon HD 7970 Video Cards – Legit Reviews