Hardware AMD Radeon 7970 3GB GHz Edition Review

AMD's back, with a surprise overclocked version of the HD 7970 3GB and some fancy new drivers. Is it enough to dethrone the mighty GTX 680 2GB? Amazingly, yes! But not without some caveats.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2012/06/22/amd-radeon-7970-3gb-ghz-edition-review/1

 

said it before - would like to see comparison of first gen DX11 - 5870 / gtx 480 so we can see just how much faster the high end has come

 

In that case they should do a High End, Mid Range and Low End comparison so we can see where the most improvements for performance and bang for buck have come.

 

charts would be too big then - you want to look at high end to high end , mid to mid etc

 

They usually do that every now and then I think, as Baz (I think) said, it takes 2-3 hours to review each card so doing something like that could take days if not an entire week.

Quite a nice review and it is good to see AMD have something that can compete, it is just a shame it suffers from GTX480 syndrome by being more powerful at the expense of noise and heat.

 

Harry, are we likely to see a GHz edition of the 7950 and/or other models?

 

No word from AMD; The quality GPUs all go into 7970s, so I'd guess no. When I OC'd the 7950 review samples, 1GHz was right on the edge without hefty over-volting.

 

Would love to see if you can reflash the BIOS on the original 7970 or if there's some hardware flag.

 

It's obviously interesting to see what an overclocked card will do, sadly what this means is that top quality GPU's will be selected for this card over standard 7970's, probably resulting in them no longer clocking as high as older versions because of it.

Seems to me, if you are going to buy a 7970 buy a standard one now, with an effective 3rd party cooler and then overclock it - seems to be chealer and equally as effective as this.

Just an observation - I remember how hard ( and rightly so imho) Bit-Tech/CPC came down on Nvidia like a ton of bricks for the 480 fermi. This 7970 3GB GHz Edition card is hot, loud and consumes more power than it's rivals/siblings, yet you fall short of expressing this in the same way as you did for the green team... consistency is a beautiful thing and conspicuous only by it's absence.

 

Well, the review says it's louder than other cards and it does draw more power, but I can't see any reference to it being especially hot. It's identical to the 680 in the temperature charts.

 

Hmmm could be ideal for watercooling my 480 needs replacing in the next few months.

 

In other news...


AMD release none 1GHz edition at 75MHz less on the core (925MHz)... it overclocks to 1GHz... and performs the same!


Waits for Nvidia 1075Mhz GTX680 edition


*yawn*

 

I knew this would come up! However

480 was; hotter, louder, 100W hungier, and £100 more

7970 GHz is no hotter, louder, 60W hungrier and £20 less

Hence, why we point out these issues, but don't ton of bricks it.

 

You forget the context of the time it arrives in. The 480 was highly anticipated, yet was pretty naff really all things being considered.

The 'new' 7970 isn't new, it's just part of a binning exercise, pure and simple, and shows temperature and power consumption behaivour inline with increasing voltages and operating frequencies whilst keeping the cooling hardware the same.

 

Seems it's the almost definite better option for multi monitor gaming. I was always a bit disappointed when Nvidia announced 2GB on the 6XX. Can't see AMD re-hashing their power consumption adverts now though. Tsk Tsk!.

Also worth remembering the 480 although a bit of a miniature sun, was significantly faster than AMD's card at the time.

 

Hey, you!

You want the fastest single GPU card in the world? You want the 7970 Ghz Edition.

Good work AMD! Shame they didn't have the drivers/price/speeds when the 7970 was first released.

 

Is there a table missing with volumes on? Isn't there usually one showing all the decibels?

Looks good to me though. The review sounds almost disappointed, but I think that is mostly looking at the grand scheme of things. When you look at the card itself, performance for money, this card seems pretty good, doesn't it? I'll wait to see what price they come in at.

I plan on buying a 2560x1440 resolution sometime this year, so I am keeping my eye out for a powerful single card graphics card to let me play games at that resolution with good settings. The monitor itself isn't even all that expensive... but these ~£400 cards make me wince. I am hoping maybe after the summer there will be slightly less painful prices.

 

Although by CPC's testing, it wasn't significantly faster; it was dependent on which game you were playing as to whether the 480 was faster or slower than the 5870. Same thing with the bit-tech review; sometimes faster, sometimes slower.

 

ati with updated driver... now then test nvidia with the updated driver...

 

We did. Check the test setup page. All cards tested with 304.48 beta.