So who else has fallen into a Skyrim addiction this winter? I received a copy for Christmas, but it was for the XBOX 360, not the PC. In a way, I am kind of glad my wife made that mistake. Being a new father, and a 3rd shifter, I've been on night duty to watch my daughter. A console copy meant that I could multitask and play while my daughter slept on my chest. A PC copy would have meant having to sit in the office with constant back and forth running whenever there was a fuss. Needless to say, I was able to beat just about everything rather quickly, and moved on without a long term addiction.
Now that my daughter is sleeping more at night, and we have transitioned her to her crib, I have time again to jump on the PC for my gaming needs. There is no new addiction yet because the free time has been spent catching up on reviews. One thing that was on the horizon that I had been looking forward to was the AMD 7000 series launch. I have nearly every model of the 6000 series in my collection and am about ready for the next generation. There was that selective soft launch of the 7970 before Christmas that I wasn't privy to, however, I do have my hands on the newest 7950.
The Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Overclocked Edition pumps up the original stock model. The HD 7950 OC Edition comes with a factory overclock with the core set to 900MHz. Also included is Sapphire's new dual-extractor technology, or Dual-X. The Dual-X is a secondary cooler with an efficient multi-heatpipe design and dual fans. This improved cooler keeps the card cooler and quieter under idle and load conditions. Onboard is 3GB of fast DDR5 memory with an effective clock speed of 5Gb/s. Features of the new 7950 remain intact, such as the new Graphics Core Next, or GCN. This is AMD's term for their new 28nm architecture. The 7950 also supports a Dual BIOS switch. Sapphire has loaded a new second BIOS that unlocks the CCC OC limit and adds an aggressive fan profile. The 7950 OC supports the newest PCI-E 3.0 bus interface and is loaded with 1792 stream processors.
