Just installed pics - Gigabyte 7950 CF - AMD ZeroCore and Heaven Bench

[Hauk]

I thought about grabbing 7950 CF at product launch but held out. With the recent price cuts, I caved. Just got em running and wanted to share first impressions.

Gigabyte went with a plastic shroud for the latest WindForce cooler. IMO, a shroud should be sturdy enough to hold the card by without flexing or bending; this proved to be the case as it's fairly thick plastic. The metal bracket used to stiffen the PCB looks good too. Nice job Gigabyte:

Installed pic:

AMD ZeroCore
I run multi-gpu and surf nearly as much as I game; so I liked the idea of ZeroCore upon hearing about it. Does it work? Seems so.

Here's GPU1 in idle:

and GPU2 (notice GPU, memory, and temp numbers):

Worth noting, ZeroCore will not engage with GPU-Z running. GPU2 will sit at 800 core and 1300 mem.

Sure a Kill-A-Watt is not the most precise way to measure power consumption; but it's
cheap and shows ZeroCore works. Here's system at idle just before ZeroCore engages:

and after:

Unigine Heaven 3.0
Plenty of benchmarks already out there so I did a quick run of Heaven using 560ti 448 SLI @ 800 core and 7950CF @ 950 core. A mismatch, but all I had on hand. 560ti 448 SLI posts some respectable numbers though.

560ti 448 SLI, no AA, 4x AF, tesslation disabled:

560ti 448 SLI, 4x AA, 16x AF, extreme tesslation:

7950 CF, no AA, 4x AF, tesslation disabled:

7950 CF, 4x AA, 16x AF, extreme tesslation:

 

[KompuKare]

Hm, intereting. Not the CF 7970 (totally outside the budget I'd spend on computer parts). But the ZeroCore bit (silly me I had been calling it ZeroPower all this time...).

So it lists Clock @ 0MHz, RAM @ 0MHz, Power @ 0%, Temp @ 0°C but fan at 20%. Hm, kind of disappointed if that's accurate: surely if the second card is 'off' the fan should stop too or at least that's the way I'd want it to work.

Maybe a later revision of drivers or with the 8000 series. I really would like them to implement ZeroCore when using HybridCrossfire on their APUs. Might make me upgrade to something like Trinity if it had ok CPU performance and could keep the dGPU off using ZeroCore while not gaming.

 

[blackened23]

Nice. OC those suckers, you will probably have to use manual fan if oc / overvolt but I bet you can get 1100+ no problems.

Newest version of MSI afterburner should get you running, use the -xcl argument to extend clocks.

 

[OILFIELDTRASH]

Solid info. Zerocore looks impressive. 122w idle on a crossfire rig is amazing.

 

[Hauk]

..So it lists Clock @ 0MHz, RAM @ 0MHz, Power @ 0%, Temp @ 0°C but fan at 20%. Hm, kind of disappointed if that's accurate: surely if the second card is 'off' the fan should stop too or at least that's the way I'd want it to work..

Nice catch! I just checked, card 2 fans DO stop spinning so it's OFF with ZeroCore active. CCC still reports 20% fan speed though.

@ blackened23, yep I'll do some healthy OC'ing later. I particularly want to see what happens with The Witcher 2 ubersampling enabled..

 

[Don Karnage]

Those cards should easily hit 1100 core

 

[Hauk]

Solid info. Zerocore looks impressive. 122w idle on a crossfire rig is amazing.

Thanks. Yea I'm liking 122w idle, especially on an LGA 2011 platform w/16GB in quad channel. I'm letting my ASRock Extreme 7 bios auto tune an i7 3820 to 4.2GHz. It does 1.24v @ 4.2 and 1.008v @ 1.2GHz. Works for me.

 

[KompuKare]

Nice catch! I just checked, card 2 fans DO stop spinning so it's OFF with ZeroCore active. CCC still reports 20% fan speed though.

@ blackened23, yep I'll do some healthy OC'ing later. I particularly want to see what happens with The Witcher 2 ubersampling enabled..

Thanks good to know! I've seen that with a lot of monitoring stuff: either the fan is off and they report 10% or 20% or they report 0% but the fan is still spinning (my Freezer 7 when spinning too slow (sorry no tachometer so unsure how slow)).