Ghz edition 7970 coming very soon! (Softpedia)

[mple]

So what's "very soon"? A few days? Few weeks?

 

[nismotigerwvu]

I have lots of broken ones too that I don't bother listing in addition to a couple duplicates. I'm definately a collector. I always sell my current highend cards early to fund the purchase of a new one so I don't take the big depreciation hit.

Picking up the cards second hand a few years later is so cheap and fun!!

True that, you should put that Voodoo 5 in a shadowbox and hang it up on the wall.

 

[RussianSensation]

The pre-overclocked cards always cost more. This new uber-7970 will cost more than the vanilla 7970 and you could just overclock the thing yourself, binning aside.

What would you buy a 925mhz 7970 that maxes out at 1.25ghz on air OR a 1.1ghz 7970 that maxes out at 1.25ghz on air? AMD never said they are raising prices on the newer stepping.

AMD launching faster clocked HD7970 is not the same as AIBs charging $30-40 extra for useless 3-5% marketing pre-overclocks. It's about relaunching a better stepping of a chip with much higher guaranteed stock clocks and maybe even with higher overclocking potential.

Also, it's great that a chip like 3570K has tons of overclocking headroom but if Intel sold me that exact chip with 4.5ghz clocks for $225, I'd buy that instead. In other words, if products could be pushed to their absolute max from the factory, I could care less about overclocking. Imagine if 3570K came with 4.8ghz clocks for $225? Why in the world would I want a 3570K @ 3.4ghz so I have to overclock it to the same 4.8ghz? In the real world, companies don't push products to the edge, leaving us with some overclocking headroom. However, in some cases they are too conservative which can backfire when the competitor releases a faster product.

$500 GPUs are premium products. They should already come with great performance and stock 7970 didn't. HD7970 should have launched with 1.1 ghz clocks to begin with so everyone would have 1.1ghz performance guaranteed. If those samples overclocked to 1.2-1.25ghz, great! However, at minimum everyone would get very good performance. Instead, we got a 925mhz clock card that was just 25% faster than a stock 580. That would be like NV shipping GTX480 with 550mhz clocks and telling us to overclock it ourselves to 800mhz. I'd rather buy a $500 GTX480 with 700mhz clocks and overclock it to 800mhz than buy a $500 GTX480 with 550mhz clocks and play the overclocking lottery, which is not always guaranteed.

Using your logic, the more underclocked a chip is from the factory, the better it is. It doesn't work that way. For instance, wouldn't you rather pay $250 for a 1.2ghz 7850 rather than have to pay $250 and manually try to overclock it there? Overclocking is not guaranteed which is why the faster the chip is from the factory, the better it is for most people. From a business perspective, when yields and 28nm process weren't as mature 925mhz 7970 made sense. When yields and 28nm node improve, it's only logical that AMD would launch faster clocked verisons. It's been that way for generations (GTX280 --> GTX285, 4870 --> 4890, etc.).

 

[TakeNoPrisoners]

AMD launching faster clocked HD7970 is not the same as AIBs charging $30-40 extra for useless 3-5% marketing pre-overclocks. It's about relaunching a better stepping of a chip with much higher guaranteed stock clocks and higher overclocking potential for most likely the same price.

Also, it's great that a chip like 3570K has tons of overclocking headroom but if Intel sold me that exact chip with 4.5ghz clocks for $225, I'd buy that instead. In other words, if products can be pushed to their absolute max from the factory, I could care less about overclocking. Imagine if 3570K came with 4.7ghz clocks for $225? That would be stellar.

$500 GPUs are premium products. They should already come with great performance and stock 7970 didn't. HD7970 should have launched with 1.1 ghz clocks to begin with so everyone would have 1.1ghz performance guaranteed. If those samples overclocked to 1.2-1.25ghz, great! However, at minimum everyone would get very good performance. Instead, we got a 925mhz clock card that was just 25% faster than a stock 580. That would be like NV shipping GTX480 with 550mhz clocks and telling us to overclock it ourselves to 800mhz. I'd rather buy a $500 GTX480 with 700mhz clocks and overclock it to 800mhz than buy a $500 GTX480 with 550mhz clocks rather than play the overclocking lottery, which is not always guaranteed.

I think AMD launched the 7970 with such low clocks so they didn't have the supply issues the GTX 680 has.

Now that the process is so much more mature and they actually have some competition it makes sense to put the 7970 at the clocks it was designed to run at.

 

[3DVagabond]

FWIU, the clocks were set based on their engineering samples. The chips since then are much better. It's possible that even the first batch of production chips were much better than the engineering samples were? Rather than retest and re-certify them, and possibly delay the launch, they just went with what they had.

As has been stated, now there's competition and AMD is going to step it up. Hopefully they (Rory) learned that they can't put a half baked effort out. nVidia will pounce all over anything like that every time.

 

[Rvenger]

The pre-overclocked cards always cost more. This new uber-7970 will cost more than the vanilla 7970 and you could just overclock the thing yourself, binning aside.

This is not a pre-overclocked card. Its a reference card with a new stepping, who knows it might do 1600mhz core. They should go back to the 'pro and XT' monikers and should have called it the 7970XT lol.

 

[SickBeast]

Hmm...Thanks for that, guys.

It's good that competition is heating up.

 

[RussianSensation]

I think AMD launched the 7970 with such low clocks so they didn't have the supply issues the GTX 680 has.

Now that the process is so much more mature and they actually have some competition it makes sense to put the 7970 at the clocks it was designed to run at.

Ya, pretty much. It was a good move from a business perspective on a new 28nm node. They even said from the beginning that they expected AIBs to ship much faster clocked 7970s. The problem is almost hardly any of them did. At best we got a couple of cards that came with factory pre-overclocks of 1050-1070mhz. If AMD has a new stepping that can "easily hit 1250mhz" as rumored, HD7970 OC version can be sold for $500 without any price cuts. That's a win-win for AMD and consumers since most 7970's can't hit 1250mhz on air today (not easily) and AMD still gets to keep its gross margins.

 

[3DVagabond]

Hmm...Thanks for that, guys.

It's good that competition is heating up.

Of course, you could be completely correct and AMD will try and charge more for it. (Now that we've all abused you. LOL )

None of us know for sure. It would be a dumb move IMO to actually raise the price of something because the process has matured. It's supposed to be the other way around. I'm all for giving AMD/nVidia the benefit of the doubt with current pricing because, at the present time, 28nm manufacturing could be very expensive (higher wafer prices, reduced yields compared to 40nm). If they try and raise the prices on us though as time goes on, I'll find it really hard to try and justify it.

 

[lavaheadache]

True that, you should put that Voodoo 5 in a shadowbox and hang it up on the wall.

ironically enough I just sold it today for $200

I've had that ah heck since launch too. I will miss it.

 

[blackened23]

I like AMD's stuff but....I would be more interested if it were a chip revision, similar to what nvidia did with the GF110. Nvidia managed to harvest chips for a better TDP and higher clock speeds to transform the gtx 480 into the much better 580...that would be something to get exited about...

Maybe AMD will put a rabbit out of their hat, but not too exited about a minor clock speed jump.

 

[Rvenger]

I like AMD's stuff but....I would be more interested if it were a chip revision, similar to what nvidia did with the GF110. Nvidia managed to harvest chips for a better TDP and higher clock speeds to transform the gtx 480 into the much better 580...that would be something to get exited about...

Maybe AMD will put a rabbit out of their hat, but not too exited about a minor clock speed jump.

I think AMD's main issue is drivers. I really think there is still untapped power in the 7970's that we may never see. Kind of reminds me of the PS3 LOL

 

[Plimogz]

I like AMD's stuff but....I would be more interested if it were a chip revision, similar to what nvidia did with the GF110. Nvidia managed to harvest chips for a better TDP and higher clock speeds to transform the gtx 480 into the much better 580...that would be something to get exited about...

Maybe AMD will put a rabbit out of their hat, but not too exited about a minor clock speed jump.

your excitement not withstanding, one can hardly compare a higher-clocking stepping of Tahiti to GF100-->GF110.

For one thing, Tahiti shipped fully-functional from day 1, so there are no disabled units to activate in an eventual second revision of the flagship card, unlike Fermi.

For another, assuming these cards get here in the next month or so (and why not?), there would've been a 5-6 month space between launches. Which is rather shorter than the 9-10 months which separated GTX480 and GTX580.

This card strikes me as an effort to regain the single GPU crown, and not much else. And would amount to a fleshing out of the current lineup; not even a refresh.

And if AMD fields a card capable of beating GTX680 at shipping clocks, I can't see why they wouldn't have it take up 7970's old price point at the top of the single-GPU hill.

 

[SlowSpyder]

So what? I've had a 1.2GHz edition since January. Neener neener neener!

A new stepping is cool, it seems that almost every 7970 is capable of 1.15GHz. Many can get to 1.3GHz. If this new stepping allows 1.4-1.5GHz+, that'd be awesome. I don't see many people trading in their GTX680's or 7970's, but it doesn't hurt to have another product on the market and more cool tech to read reviews on. I'd like to see what the new stepping can do.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

This is nothing but good news for consumers.

As a reference model, I would fully expect this to maintain the current price point of the 7970 while offering generally better performance than the GTX680. Even sweeter would be AMD taking a page out of NV's playbook and "launching" these cards to reviewers (a ghz 7970 and 7950) alongside NV's GTX670 launch.

Lets get these guys undercutting one another so I can buy a new GPU that doesn't cost $350 dollars.

AMD's biggest weakness is their unwillingness to really play ball the way Nvidia does. NV is in the graphics business to win. AMD seems like they're in the graphics business to sell more processors, which makes no sense. This is a step in the right direction. If AMD can release a chip 3 months before Nvidia, then spin on a dime and release a faster revision when challenged, it shows that they're starting to take the game more seriously than they did before.

 

[Upgrade_Itch]

$500 GPUs are premium products. They should already come with great performance and stock 7970 didn't. HD7970 should have launched with 1.1 ghz clocks to begin with so everyone would have 1.1ghz performance guaranteed.

You sure seem to know all the answers for a guy that doesn't even HAVE a 7970, eh?

ANY Sapphire 7970 OC Edition owner is GUARANTEED to get a core overclock WELL IN EXCESS of 1100 Mhz.

Flipping the bios switch starts you at 1000 Mhz core....u can raise it to at least 1125 core with no voltage, most 1150 Mhz.

ADD some voltage thru Afterburner or Trixx and 1200- 1300 Mhz is attainable.

FROM AN OWNER, not a [liar].

I ran 3dmark2k11 at stock 2.8 Ghz cpu, 1200/1600 on the 7970 (although it reported 2.9 Ghz cpu and 150/300 for my gpu)

http://3dmark.com/3dm11/3346770

I ran it with Morphological filtering on, enhance application setting, 16X AF, enable surface format optimization, quality vertical refresh, super sampling 4X AA, Triple buffering Open GL NOT IN PERFORMANCE MODE in ccc. (Same settings I game at in any game)

 

[GodisanAtheist]

You sure seem to know all the answers for a guy that doesn't even HAVE a 7970, eh?

ANY Sapphire 7970 OC Edition owner is GUARANTEED to get a core overclock WELL IN EXCESS of 1100 Mhz.

Flipping the bios switch starts you at 1000 Mhz core....u can raise it to at least 1125 core with no voltage, most 1150 Mhz.

ADD some voltage thru Afterburner or Trixx and 1200- 1300 Mhz is attainable.

FROM AN OWNER, not a bullshitter.

-In a perfect world, no videocard should have any oc'ing headroom, as they should come fully tapped out from the factory. Why am I paying for a whole load of untapped power and why do I have to move a bunch of sliders around to get performance inherent to a card? We do not live in a perfect world, but this higher clocked ref edition is a step in the right direction.

Then they should release special underclocked OC editions of the cards so everyone that likes playing pong with software sliders can feel the rush of accomplishment bringing the clocks to where they should be. Super OC cards can require pencil traces and soldering on VRMs and chokes...

 

[Upgrade_Itch]

AMD ( I think) wasn't sure exactly what Nvidia was releasing (680 hardware details) so they severely underclocked these cards + now that they see what they are up against they are shipping out higher clocked cards WITH LESS OC headroom........

 

[Upgrade_Itch]

With an overclocked i5 2500k I think I could hit at least 10.5k on that test (my cpu scored like crap but my gfx score was decent)

 

[3DVagabond]

This is nothing but good news for consumers.

As a reference model, I would fully expect this to maintain the current price point of the 7970 while offering generally better performance than the GTX680. Even sweeter would be AMD taking a page out of NV's playbook and "launching" these cards to reviewers (a ghz 7970 and 7950) alongside NV's GTX670 launch.

Lets get these guys undercutting one another so I can buy a new GPU that doesn't cost $350 dollars.

AMD's biggest weakness is their unwillingness to really play ball the way Nvidia does. NV is in the graphics business to win. AMD seems like they're in the graphics business to sell more processors, which makes no sense. This is a step in the right direction. If AMD can release a chip 3 months before Nvidia, then spin on a dime and release a faster revision when challenged, it shows that they're starting to take the game more seriously than they did before.

You've touched on what makes nVidia go. Love him or hate him it's Jen-Hsun Huang (Jensen). It's his company. He's not a hired hand by the board to oversee things. He's passionate about his company. He isn't trying to pocket as much money as possible before his contract is up. The company follows one man's vision. He's an entrepreneur. He also knows as much as anyone about GPU's. I don't approve of many of his business practices, but he's old school. You know where he stands and where you stand with him.

AMD made some decisions that got them terribly in debt. That's something that forces them to be conservative. It also soaks up profits that could go towards R&D and marketing. It's also likely why they embrace open source as much as they do. They let others do the developing they can't afford themselves. If they had the same issues as nVidia had with Fermi and now Kepler they probably wouldn't survive, IMO.

They obviously have terrific engineers in their GPU division. They also seem to have a better grasp on what can and what can't actually be manufactured. Probably because of their connection with GloFo. So, while Jensen is frustrated with TSMC not being able to bring his creations to fruition. AMD probably sits there and wonders exactly what Jensen was thinking when he designs these giant chips. It's easy to say that they are lucky nVidia has all of these issues when transitioning to a new process (or a new Dx, or faster VRAM), but I actually think they make their own luck by understanding the manufacturing better and being able to advance to new technologies better.

To try and get back on topic.

AMD wanted to be first to market. They did what they had to to get there. Judging from the clocks even the first retail cards could reach, they were likely a bit too conservative with Tahiti. nVidia jumped all over it and was able to trump Tahiti. This is in spite of not having their big gun, GK100->110. I'll assume that Rory is at least as smart as I am (joking) and will learn not to take nVidia lightly and only release the best product he can. Once AMD realized the potential for clock speeds on 28nm they should have taken a step back and reloaded the 7970, and by default 7950, at higher clocks. It probably would have only delayed the launch by a few weeks to certify the chips at higher clocks.

If they had done that there would be no gtx 680 right now. The 680 has obviously been released purely to rain on AMD's parade and not allow them to have the entire market to themselves. The lack of supplies shows that GK104 wasn't ready for prime time. It did take the wind out of Tahiti's sails though and make people question purchasing them.

Speculation
Now we have the 670. I think nVidia is releasing the 670 now, because they still don't have enough 680's and yields or wafer starts aren't ramping up fast enough. They need something that they can actually sell in enough volume to generate income. Not just hurt the competition. If they were going to have 680's anytime soon, why would they make the 670 so close in performance? Face it, if performance is as good as these early reviews/leaks have shown, and I believe it is, then how many 680's are they going to sell for $100 more? How many people honestly consider the 7870 at $100 more than the 7850? I think we'll be seeing the same situation with the 670->680. This only makes sense if you don't have any 680's to sell.

I don't know the actual clocks these "new chips" can clock at. if possible AMD should do the 7970-GHz at 1200MHz and a 7950-GHz at whatever it takes to be faster than the 670 (1000MHz-1050MHz?). That won't leave enough space between the 7950 and the 680 for nVidia to squeeze another sku in. This could give AMD the top 2 fastest cards. That would make people sit up and pay attention.

Also
Just to continue on with the strategy of only releasing the best cards possible they need to redo the 7800's too. The 7870's are starting to hit 1300MHz and even 1400MHz. They need to raise the default clocks on those too. nVidia, right now, has no answer for the 7800's. If AMD stands pat and doesn't capitalize on this Rory needs to go back to selling laptops.

Sorry for the wall of text, guys. I work for a company that's also very conservative and I deal with this type of frustration daily. So, you guys just took the brunt of it. I understand that AMD might not be able to do everything I've said here. It's obvious though that they can do more than they are.

 

[Upgrade_Itch]

The 670's about to release are all failed 680's.....The rate of 680 failures I've heard was excessively high...........

 

[Jaydip]

Source please Mr Itch

 

[Upgrade_Itch]

http://forum.xbitlabs.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19761&start=0

"Overall this looks to be another solid win from Kepler, which is simply a more efficient architecture than the competing AMD 'Southern Islands' at the heart of the HD 7970 and 7950. One question is, as always price; we're unsure of how many of each manufactured Kepler cores are duds and thus how expensive each Nvidia part truly is to make. The percentage that are fully usable (the 'yield') is an extremely closely guarded secret, but suggestions swirl that a lot less Keplers are viable as compared with Southern Islands. Nonetheless part of the beauty (and part the main reason for the existence) of 'cut-down' cards like this is that they are designed to only use part of the core - in this case seven eighths. As such a lot of partially failed cores originally destined, but rejected, for the GTX 680 likely can be 'recycled' for use in the GTX 670. "

****Nobody can confirm ""officially" as we don't work for Nvidia and Nvidia wouldn't allow it to be publicized....But thats the case for top end cards, especially those that go into a new phase with much smaller die size. A higher rate of failures occur, until the procedure gets perfected....These cards that fail are often cut down a percentage and resold as the next tier down.

Failed 7970's become 7950's...........failed GTX 580's become 570's...etc

 

[aaksheytalwar]

If this card is going to be like 30-35% faster than current 7970s. How much faster would 8970 be from today's 7970s?

 

[Jaydip]

0% 0/100=0 it is not there yet