Asus HD 7950 Direct CU II review

There's a tremendous sense of value when you get this Asus version of AMD's HD 7950 out of the box. It really is rather massive.

The triple-slot cooling array means that you're going to have to think long and hard about whether you've got enough space inside your PC chassis to house such a behemoth of a card.

That said it's not a bad little performer, especially at this price point. AMD has managed to be incredibly aggressive on pricing as new Nvidia-shaped competitors have hit the streets, and to have this sort of performance for much less than £300 is impressive.

This card swaps performance leads with the more expensive GTX 670 across our benchmarking suite, showing that it has the chops at both hi-res and in the more compute-oriented games/lighting engines we've started to come across.

The huge cooling array on this Asus card means that this AMD card can either run incredibly quietly, or it can be overclocked to within an inch of its life. That will push it up towards the speeds of the original HD 7970 and keep it on par with the overclocking chops of the GTX 670.

Realistically if you were to be spending serious money on a graphics card right now - unless you were powering a couple of very high-res screens that is - then we'd probably have to say the HD 7950 is the way to go. It's here at a great price, comes with excellent performance at the top-end, and this card offers some serious overclocking options too.