Last month AMD introduced the Radeon HD 7000 series (Southern Islands) of graphics cards. These new cards are based on the 28nm manufacturing process and use a new core architecture called Graphics Core Next (GCN). The first video cards that make up the Radeon HD 7000 series were made available in January 2012 with the introduction of both the Radeon HD 7970 and Radeon HD 7950. These two cards both use a GPU core, codenamed Tahiti, that has up to 2048 usable stream processors and 3GB of GDDR5 memory. We found this card to be the fastest single GPU solution available on the market today, but you need to be willing to pay for it because the AMD Radeon HD 7970 and Radeon HD 7950 cost $549.99 and $449.99, respectively. Those on a budget will find it hard to justify buying a graphics card at those prices and have been waiting on the more affordable mainstream cards to be made available.