AMD’s response to the GTX 660 Ti’s launch has been lightning-quick. Less than two days before NVIDIA’s new Kepler-based products hit the market, we received a revamped BIOS for the HD 7950 which added PowerTune Boost to the card’s already impressive list of features. The result is a refreshed SKU which has been named the Boost State Edition by PowerColor (or variations thereof by other board partners) and –at least according to AMD’s PR team- would be no more expensive than other HD 7950s already on the market.

We took these claims with a grain of salt since we heard a similar story with the HD 7970 GHz Edition which was initially supposed to become available at $449 soon after its announcement in June. That didn’t happen as GHz Editions only became available in the last few weeks and many were priced well above $449. Luckily, AMD seems hell-bent on avoiding past mistakes and limited quantities of the HD 7950 Boost Edition started showing up for $349 late last week. We actually bought one, hence why this review is going up now. There was also some concern some cards wouldn’t carry a new labeling scheme but we were happily proven wrong as AMD’s board partners brought clearly labeled Boost Edition cards into the retail channels. Mission accomplished on both of those fronts.

So far it looks like Sapphire, PowerColor and HIS will all have products supporting the Boost feature but the list of board partners that have chosen to either delay or (for the time being) go without a HD 7950 Boost SKU is quite long. In North America alone, Tier One AiBs like XFX, ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI and Diamond have all foregone Boost Edition announcements for the time being. The reasoning behind this is actually quite simple from a business perspective. According to our sources, there’s currently a large supply of standard HD 7950’s already in the channel and the introduction of an official Boost Edition at $349 has devalued the partners’ current inventory. As a result, many companies will either be moving towards heavy discounts of the standard cards before transitioning to a Boost version or may possibly take a wait-and-see approach to properly judge people’s reactions.