Benchmark Results And Overclocking
3DMark 11
It barely makes a difference if a Radeon HD 7950 is clocked at 880 MHz or 900 MHz in 3DMark 11. Compare to AMD's reference 800 MHz, however, and the distinction is much clearer.
All of these boards lose to Nvidia's GeForce GTX 670, though, even though HIS' HD 7950 IceQ Turbo almost manages to catch up to it in Crysis 2. Unfortunately, four of these six boards cost more than the $400 GTX 670, hurting their value proposition against the competition.
Crysis 2 (DirectX 11)
Overclocking
We overclocked each card as much as possible without increasing their voltage settings. Half of them managed to hit 1050 MHz, while the other half maxed out at 1025 MHz.
Bear in mind that doing this pushes power consumption into Radeon HD 7970 territory, though performance is also able to exceed a GeForce GTX 670 in Crysis 2. HIS' HD 7950 IceQ Turbo even manages to edge out the GeForce GTX 680 by two-tenths of a frame per second. The caveats, of course, are that the GeForce-based cards were running at their stock frequencies and that factory-overclocked versions of those cards are already available, too. Moreover, Crysis 2 is a game that scales well with GPU clock rate, and it's known to work well on AMD's hardware. Titles like Battlefield 3 and DiRT 3, which favor Nvidia-based board, instead show the GeForces on top.
