AMD Upgrades All Radeon HD 7950 from 800 to 850 MHz for Free

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 660 Ti graphics card will soon start causing a ruckus, so Advanced Micro Devices is, naturally, preparing preemptive measures, or one of them anyway.

By preemptive measures we mean to say that the Sunnyvale, California-based company is going to give the world an extra reason to buy the Radeon HD 7950 instead of NVIDIA's card. AMD was early to the pie with the 28nm generation of GPUs so, naturally, NVIDIA has to make up for being late by making something better. Given rumors of 1,050 MHz GTX 660 Ti units, we can safely say that NVIDIA is playing its cards mostly right. In fact, even at 980 MHz / 1033 MHz GPU Boost, the product is set to be quite powerful. AMD's answer to the threat of this sub-$400 product (320-350 Euro) is simple: upgrade all existing Radeon HD 7950 adapters. That means both sold and unsold cards.

Long story short, the corporation has prepared a new BIOS that will raise the base frequency from 800 MHz to 850 MHz. The BIOS also introduces the PowerTune with boost feature, which acts in a similar manner to NVIDIA's GPU Boost technology. When applications demand that extra edge, the clock speed can go even higher than 850 MHz, to 925 MHz. All in all, though the new logic won't match the frequency of NVIDIA's GTX 660 Ti, it will reduce the difference to acceptable levels. Everything else about AMD's board will remain unchanged, including the price. Thus, if AMD isn't all that quick in releasing the GHz edition of the graphics card, installing the BIOS could be a good idea (provided users know what they are doing). Naturally, all HD 7950 manufactured from the middle of this month (August 2012) onward will feature it right from the factory.

AMD Radeon HD 7950
Image credits to AMD

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