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Abz Hussain

Abz Hussain

Abz Hussain

Associate
Joined
18 Mar 2011
Posts
810
Location
East London.
First off guys, big thanks for all the advice you have given me over the last few days.
Final bit now..i have decided to go with a single HD7950 3GB over the GTX 670 2GB for my single monitor @ 1440/1600p.
I will not be going multi monitor.
I will be over clocking the 7950.
I prefer to watercool the 7950 (silence and aesthetics in my rig).
The games i play are not the most demanding on GPU.
I want it to last me a a couple of years.
Is it the right choice?

If so, which 7950 do you recommend? I have seen the 3 slot Asus one about £35 cheaper at a competitor so im looking at one. (Wanna price match OcUK?).
Cheers.
 
If you're definitely water cooling I would get the cheapest 7950 you can get.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-049-HS&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1673

If you want a slightly better 7950 - though you will need to check for block availability - then the MSI TFIII V2 cards are decent as they're on the 7970 PCB and as such are likely to overclock better in experience. These cards aren't recommended for air cooling as there has been issues with them but if you put a water block on they'll be fine.

Other than that the Gigabyte WF 3x card is nice as an air cooler if you're not 100% on water cooling.
 
Would advise against the non-premium ASUS cards. Many issues with voltage overclocking with this series of cards, the TOP mainly.

As said. Cheapest voltage unlocked certified card is advised.
 
One more Q i forgot to ask. How long can i expect the 7950 to realistically serve me? They are already a year old, can i skip the anticipated 8XXX series and look to upgrade generation after that without too much performance drop.
Dont really want to crossfire as im in the one powerful gpu camp as opposed to two in sli/xfire.
 
Abz Hussain said:
One more Q i forgot to ask. How long can i expect the 7950 to realistically serve me? They are already a year old, can i skip the anticipated 8XXX series and look to upgrade generation after that without too much performance drop.
Dont really want to crossfire as im in the one powerful gpu camp as opposed to two in sli/xfire.
Click to expand...

Depends on how much eyecandy you want to see in future games, how demanding said games will be and how much more powerful the next gen will be.

Going on rumours, the next gen wont be much of a step up and not many games will really require that many settings turned down if at all for a 7950 to run @60fps etc. Meaning you should be fine for the 9*** 8** cards.
 
You could ask them, I sent a message to Gigabyte to ask them if I could remove the heatsink on my GTX670 and they said yes as long as I'm careful lol
 
It seems the MSI TFIII V2 7950 is a reference 7950 so you'll need that, double check the site as I'm tired and just want to make sure it's correct :)

[edit: EK's site is wrong, it's on a 7970 PCB apparently]
 
Last edited:
Space Monkey said:
It seems the MSI TFIII V2 7950 is a reference 7950 so you'll need that, double check the site as I'm tired and just want to make sure it's correct :)
Click to expand...

Yes i have been there already, and according to that site a 7950 full cover block is available for that card. However as someone mentioned above that may be for Version 1, this is a Version 2 card.
 
Afaik you can only 'officially' void warranty on cooler removal if you:

A) make a mess of it
B) buy an xfx card covered in warranty void if removed stickers.

The fact ocuk now use his cards for their tech lab cards tells you all you need to know about their feelings towards cooler removal.

Buying blocks for v2 7950's can be tricky as you need a 7970 block stated as compatible with v2 7950's, the only two I know of are EK CSQ & Alphacool 7970 v2 (has active vrm cooling unlike the v1). The cap layout in v2 cards is slightly different to a ref 7970.
 
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