***AMD Radeon HD7970 GHZ Edition - Official Reviews Thread***

[lavaheadache]

Ever run 3 way SLI or crossfire? No. Then you're not a high end gamer

SL i an d Cr oss fi re pr ovi de a w ors e ga min g expe rie nce as fa r as I c an tell.


Also let's not draw the elitest card depending on how many video cards you have in your system.

 

[Homeles]

SL i an d Cr oss fi re pr ovi de a w ors e ga min g expe rie nce as fa r as I c an tell.


Also let's not draw the elitest card depending on how many video cards you have in your system.

Seriously...

Glorious single GPU master race. Dirty multi-GPU gaming peasants.

 

[SirPauly]

Hehe!

 

[blackened23]

Seriously...

Single GPU master race. Dirty multi-GPU gaming peasants.

 

[Don Karnage]

SL i an d Cr oss fi re pr ovi de a w ors e ga min g expe rie nce as fa r as I c an tell.

Are you on PcP?

 

[lavaheadache]

nice =)

 

[lavaheadache]

Are you on PcP?

Not sure I understand the basis of the question.

Spending double and triple the amount of money to have an visually inferior experience seems more of a reason to ask such a question.

 

[Arzachel]

This is a genius move from AMD. Never mind the specs, it's not much more than a tweaked Powertune. It cost them peanuts compared to a respin.

 

[Arzachel]

Not sure I understand the basis of the question.

Spending double and triple the amount of money to have an visually inferior experience seems more of a reason to ask such a question.

Hey, at least people running multiple GPUs are better than audiophiles. The average fps bar increases so it's not pure placebo, even though average fps doesn't always correlate with the experience

 

[chimaxi83]

Gotta LOL at all the obvious Nvidia fanboys in here. Across the board 7970 is pretty much on par with 680, trading blows. Get over it. Everybody suddenly cares about power draw when that's the only clear winner, yet run highly overclocked multi GPU machines. Biggest contradictory facepalm if I've ever seen one.

 

[tornadog]

any new drivers out for these new cards. I am still stuck at 12.4 WHQL. With the newer ones, the HDMI audio drivers seem broken, it is unable to passthrough any HD format, on my 7970.

 

[Olikan]

any new drivers out for these new cards. I am still stuck at 12.4 WHQL. With the newer ones, the HDMI audio drivers seem broken, it is unable to passthrough any HD format, on my 7970.

yes, there is the new 12.7... a solid 10% avarage speed bump

but, non-7000 users (like me) should stay away, it seems to have lots of bugs in vliw arc...

http://imageshack.us/f/576/difcatalyst.jpg/

 

[arkcom]

Pretty sure 485 is > 473. Math issues on your end?

No it's a reading comprehension issue on yours.

The stock Ghz Edition is at 429w. When they were testing max overclocks they got 485w.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Gotta LOL at all the obvious Nvidia fanboys in here. Across the board 7970 is pretty much on par with 680, trading blows. Get over it. Everybody suddenly cares about power draw when that's the only clear winner, yet run highly overclocked multi GPU machines. Biggest contradictory facepalm if I've ever seen one.

Agreed.

 

[Skurge]

Is AMD's boost more sophisticated? Nvidia's boosts as high as the gpu can go without exceeding it. s maximum tdp and a given heat limit, whereas AMD's boosts 50mhz flat regardless of GDP. That to me sounds like nvidia's boost is more complex.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6025/radeon-hd-7970-ghz-edition-review-catching-up-to-gtx-680/2

Compared to

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/nvidia-geforce-gtx-680-review/4

Just cause it boosts higher doesn't mean it's more complex. The way AMD measres power use and heat is also a little more complex. Doesn't make it better, but it is something to note.

On that note it was interesting to see that because of their previous work with PowerTune AMD has far more granularity than NVIDIA when it comes to clockspeeds. GK104’s bins are 13MHz apart; we don’t have an accurate measure for AMD cards because there are so many bins between 1000MHz and 1050MHz that we can’t accurately count them. Nor for that matter does the 7970GE stick with any one bin for very long, as again thanks to PowerTune AMD can switch their clocks and voltages in a few milliseconds as opposed to the roughly 100ms it takes NVIDIA to do the same thing. To be frank in a desktop environment it’s not clear whether this is going to make a practical difference (we’re talking about moving less than 2% in the blink of an eye), but if this technology ever makes it to mobile a fast switching time would be essential to minimizing power consumption.

 

[notty22]

This is Wizard's take on it.

AMD has introduced a new "boost" clocking mechanism with this card, but it is nothing close to what NVIDIA offers. I think a more accurate description would be that the card "boosts" from its default of 1050 MHz down to a clock speed of 1000 MHz and reduced voltage, when it senses a power overload situation, that's it.

 

[blackened23]

Performance is really good, other stuff meh. This respin would have been much more interesting if they had used a vapor chamber cooler with a better fan. I really freakin hate AMD reference fans, on the vanilla 7970 it wasn't noisy on auto fan but at manual settings 70% or above...give me some earplugs please....

Its time to retire that POS fan and make something new IMO. Now the GHZ7970 seemingly pulls ahead at high resolutions, but if they're charging the same price as the 680 they have to be even or better on all fronts. The cooler on the 680 is better. I don't care about power consumption, but a 1200mhz overclock will be unenjoyable with high manual fan settings.

 

[Subyman]

About Dirt Showdown, I played it on my 680 and can definitely say the Advanced Lighting kills performance. I get around 60-70fps with AL on and 100+ with it off. I noticed no difference at all in the graphical fidelity with it on. As for the game, its pretty lame.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Looks like AMD marketing bulldozered another release...

AMD's claim that this is the "World's Fastest and Most Versatile GPU" is somewhat of a stretch. In the games we tested we were only seeing a performance increase that we expect to see from any overclocked Radeon HD 7970. AMD also states that the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition is "Retaking the Performance Crown," but with the highest stable overclock the performance was not better than an overclocked NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 as we showed here and here.

I don't care about power consumption if the price is right and the card performs well.

I believe the reason power/noise are coming up is because AMD isn't offering anything over Nvidia, except more power used and more noise/heat created. This is of course a stark contrast to the 480 vs 5870 which Nvidia offered considerably more tess performance as well as more overall performance in DX11 titles making their card a much better choice for todays games than the 5870 was.

 

[SolMiester]

since when did power efficiency, heat, and noise ever become relevant in buying a graphic card?

didn't the gtx 480 destroy the notion that a noisy, hot, power sucking card was bad?

The 480 had a 15% performance advantage though over its competitor!

 

[SolMiester]

I have never worried about power consumption TBH, as long as you have the correct PSU, but AMD could have come out with something different for the cooling, perhaps a close loop WC cooler or something, keeping it cool and quiet.....as really, I only see those with WC systems going for this, but then, what's the difference between GE version and original if it's only a sipped bump!

 

[DaveSimmons]

I've cared about heat, noise and power consumption for years, and have slammed both nvidia and AMD in the past for poor showings there.

This is a nice upgrade to the 7970, getting a new higher clock speed and lower cost, but I'd still rather have my GTX 680 with 67 watts less power draw and 10 db lower noise.

 

[SolMiester]

AMD could have turned into a leader of GPUs by offering an exotic cooling solution with this, instead they are just sheep once again, GPU boast LOL, direct compute, physx, multi GPU...we know they can do it, Eyefinity was a great feature, so much so that NV followed....come on AMD!, sorry but you can do better...

 

[Vesku]

AMD does not sell the cards. Any manufacturer who uses 7970 reference cooling hates their customers.

 

[HurleyBird]

The 480 had a 15% performance advantage though over its competitor!

According to computerbase, this card has a 20% advantage over GTX 680 at eyefinity res + high AA.

About Dirt Showdown, I played it on my 680 and can definitely say the Advanced Lighting kills performance. I get around 60-70fps with AL on and 100+ with it off.

The big question then is how much does this have to do with GCN's compute chops, and how much does this have to do with Codemasters targeting GCN? If it's more of the former it could be an indication of the way future games might go, if it's more of the later it could just be an extreme example of one company gaining an advantage due to heavy optimization.