Radeon HD 7950 Boost 

Furmark maximum power is basically unchanged, because AMD's PowerTune algorithm will take over in this scenario and limit maximum power.

NVIDIA's high-end GTX 680, GTX 670 and GTX 660 Ti do a bit better in power consumption, both in idle and under load.

AMD's new PowerTune Boost is following in NVIDIA's steps by evaluating a graphics card's power consumption more closely to provide an additional speed boost.

Pricing is quite reasonable with $320, given that it is just $10 more than a normal HD 7950 reference design card and significantly cheaper than the GTX 670, which offers a similar performance.

Two CrossFire connectors are available, so you may combine this card with up to three other HD 7950s for improved performance.

Today AMD launched their new HD 7950, which aims at being a high-end graphics card due to its pricing, which is comparative to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580 with its current market pricing.

It offers many monitoring and software voltage-control features and is well supported through overclocking software.

Boost and overclock out of the box will only affect gaming power-draw.

The game revolves around the epic battle between the Horde and Alliance factions with many other races getting involved in a long and complex story line.

Increased voltage will lead to increased stability at higher clock speeds, which is probably required to ensure that all cards can handle the increased clocks.

Now AMD has released a BIOS update that will improve the clock speeds of the card to provide a performance advantage against NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce GTX 660 Ti.

The new specifications see the GPU core-frequency increased to 850 MHz (from 800 MHz), and introduces PowerTune with Boost, which sends the GPU clock speed up to 925 MHz when applications demand it.

Sapphire does not use that trick, so power consumption with the boost BIOS is only slightly higher.

On the Sapphire Vapor-X, this feature has been extended to provide a BIOS that runs clocks beyond Sapphire's default clock for the HD 7950without any voltage changes, which will help keep power consumption in check.

Power consumption during gaming has increased compared to the HD 7950 reference design, but that was to be expected.