€ 696 price has popped up on this site. Surely not!!! http://www.salland.eu/product/1082713/asus-radeon-hd-7970-3072-mb-hd7970-3gd5.html
Whenever a site puts up a new prioduct for preorder at some outrageous price before any details are known, its safe to assume that you wont be paying that much if you buy on launch day. They do it for free publicity from everyone linking to it and saying OMG!
Then surely people visiting will not be impressed and think badly of the store. No store wants to advertise that they have stupidly high prices.
We see it time and time again because it works. Gets your name out there, by the time products are announced and released prices are the same as all the other sites. Overall i would say there is clearly a reason why sites do it and it must work at least some of the time.
What interests me is how big the Memory bus will be. That should really determine the transistor counts. In other news, I've found a bunch of HD5870s for >$150. In other words, there are HD5870s that are cheaper than HD6850s. Crazyness.
7970 is 384-bit mem bus @ 1.37Ghz GDDR5 according to the mill. 7950 is decreased to 1.25Ghz GDDR5 but bus is unknown so could be 256-bit...
I owned a 7950, then upgraded to my current 4850. I plan to upgrade to a 7950 early next year to go full circle.
If what I've read from various sites about the 7970 capabilities is true then I will be buying one asap.... tho not if its £450 +
It would be a different chip then. A 384-bit bus, could theoretically be cut, but 128-bits it would suffer a much more dramatic drop so I'm guessing, it's just slower RAM.
Additional unconfirmed information here - Looks like we might see some more Dual Bios action! Woopee! Also, AMD suggest the core will be able to run at 1Ghz+ and offer improved tessellation performance.
Hmm a 384bit bus? This is going to be interesting. Especially since Kepler isn't coming out anytime soon, I do really hope that this generation can double the performance of my current HD6850. I've been using GTX280-like perfromance for far too long.. Then again, there's always Crossfire..
First AMD 7970 Benchmarks Released. It has a long advert at the beginning but if you bear through it you'll be in for a great surprise. Don't need to watch the whole video just skip through the talking slowly and you will see all the slides. http://www.donanimhaber.com/ekran-karti/haberleri/AMD-Radeon-HD-7970-icin-resmi-test-sonuclari.htm
You think you've got problems? I'm sat here next to a 3.0 GHz Wolfdale and a 9600GT... *Waiting for news of AMD graphics for next months new build*
Looks like slides provided by AMD, so take it with a pinch of salt. Still, looks like a beast of a card though.