AMD Radeon HD 7950 to Arrive on January 31, Says Report

January 9 2012 has come and passed, but AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 hasn’t been joined by the cheaper HD 7950 as some of us have hoped for, but fortunately it seems like we won’t have all that much to wait until the graphics card makes its appearance.

According to some recent rumors, less than a month separates us from the launch of the Radeon HD 7950 as this is now expected to arrive on January 31.

Unlike the Radeon HD 7970 December 22 launch, the HD 7950 should be a hard release with retail availability, pricing being expected to be set at $449 (353 EUR), according to Fudzilla.

AMD’s Radeon HD 7950 is based on the same Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture and Tahiti GPU as that used for the HD 7970, but this comes with four of the core’s Compute Units disabled to turn it into the Tahiti Pro.

The end result is a graphics card that includes a total of 1792 stream processors (vs. 2048 in the HD 7970), 112 texture units, 32 ROP units and the same 384-bit wide bus of its elder brother.

The amount of memory installed also wasn’t modified so we are talking about the same 3GB of GDDR5 video buffer which has an operating speed of 1.25GHz (5GHz data rate). The Tahiti Pro GPU is clocked at 900MHz.

The power consumption figures of the AMD graphics card are not yet available, but this will feature the same ZeroCore technology as the HD 7970 that can completely turns off the card when the system is in idle with the monitor shut down. 

Other AMD Radeon HD 7950 features include support for one DVI, one HDMI and two mini-DisplayPort video outputs as well as PCI Express 3.0 and DirectX 11.1 compatibility.

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