Of late rumours have been a swirling of a 'GHz Edition' of AMD's second-fastest card. This would make some sense given the hugely overclockable 7950 design. After bugging AMD's (very helpful) press representative Atomic can now confirm such a card is quite real - we are waiting on AMD for details of clock speeds and availability.
The rumours had plenty of detractors; the minimum 19% jump to get to a ('boost clock') of 1GHz will make the 7950 GE a much faster card than the standard 7950. Not all 7950s can even reach 1GHz on stock volts - this implies either a voltage increase, or an improvement to the chip silicon. Inspite of AMD and their chip maker TSMC promising such improvements, real life testing from Atomic forum members and most review sites' conclusions indicate the 7970 GHz edition silcon is virtually identica to the vanuilla model.
As such we will likely see the same slight power draw increase in the 7950 GE as we did with the 7970 GE. There is still no real 'reference design' for the HD 7950, so coping with the (probably not too large) increases in TDP will be left to card makers such as Gigabyte and MSI to handle. The current lack of GHz edition 7970s on shelves worldwide has been explained by AMD as being due to their card partners preferring to release them as a premium part - whether these kinds of delays are experienced by the 7950 remain to be seen - we should be able to get a read on stocking soon.
AMD is also further dropping the price of 7900 and 7800 cards overseas and is likely to do so here soon. While in other markets these price drops have already filtered through before the announcement, due to cutthroat competition between card vendors, this has not ocurred here. All this means we are likely to see a 10% drop in the price of AMD's higher end cards over the coming weeks.
We will as always, keep you updated as the details roll in.
