Today AMD is launching Radeon HD 7950, its second card from the new Southern Island GPU family. To begin with, Southern Island family will be remembered as the first to introduce GPUs made in 28 nanometer silicon fabrication processes, first to use PCI Express 3.0 x16 bus, and first with DirectX 11.1 support. So whoops AMD did it again- it introduced a new generation of graphics card before Nvidia.

AMD decided to launch the fastest cards first, just like with the last generation. Radeon HD 7970 was released back in December and is available, so today we welcome the second fastest card from HD 7900 series - the Radeon HD 7950. According to AMD’s product transition sheet (picture below), the new card will be faster than any single GPU graphics card from the previous series, Northern Island. 

XFX’s Radeon HD 7950 Black Edition featuring Double Dissipation cooler ticks at 900MHz for the GPU, making for a nice, 100MHz overclock over reference 800MHz. 

HD 7970 and HD 7950 cards are based on Cayman GPU’s successor - Tahiti.

A strict selection process is used to identify the top 1% of GPUs capable of reaching maximum overclock speeds and with help of quality Duratec components (another marketing name for high end power components) XFX claims highest performance at same power consumption as standard cards.

XFX is planning on releasing four different HD 7950 graphics cards, two of which will carry Black Edition branding. Both of these cards will also run at 900MHz but they will come strapped with different coolers. More affordable versions will feature single fan cooling.