The 7 series cards from AMD were officially launched right before CES, with plenty of fanfare and early performance numbers on paper a couple weeks earlier. This time around, AMD chose not to repeat the paper launch and instead, has decided to go with a hard launch today to introduce the second card in the HD 7900 series product stack, the HD 7950. Equipped with all of the features of AMD's Southern Islands (Tahiti) Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture which include Zero Core Power, PCIe 3.0, DX 11, AMD Powerplay technology, and a shrink to AMDs 28 nm process, the HD 7950 looks to impress and follow on the performance delivered by the HD 7970. Right out of the gate, we have a pair of cards that come factory overclocked and with improved cooling to help deliver both a cooler-running GPU and one that is much quieter than the traditional squirrel cage fan design used on the AMD's reference design cards. Both Sapphire and XFX have sent out their factory overclocked cards that come with clock speeds of 900 MHz on the 28 nm Tahiti core, alongside a memory speed of 1250 MHz on the Sapphire HD 7950 Overclocked Edition and 1375 MHz on the XFX HD 7950 Black Edition Double Dissipation. Previously, we saw how the HD 7970 3GB delivered world-class performance as the fastest single GPU video card on the market. Can AMD and their partners follow up by avoiding the sophomore slump and delivering that second punch to truly define the performance of their latest architecture? Let's see how the latest from both Sapphire and XFX perform, and compare them to past generations.