Sapphire to release 7970 clocked at 1325, also a 6gb variant.

[Yukmouth]

OK that's it someone on Anandtech better be the first man to reach 1.5ghz on a gpu!!!

 

[Yukmouth]

lol, lets try this again. MOST of the reviews could hit 1125 which was the most allowed in the CCC. some reviews could not even hit 1100 though. that makes me wonder just how much voltage it would take to get to a whopping 1325.

Exactly. Probably just has a better VRM/Power Phase like the 460 hawk that was able to hit 1ghz so frequently. If you're an overclocker it'll be your best option, as I doubt they'd sell these cards unless they were certain they could get it out in volume.

Looks like AMD has a gem of a chip on their hands.

 

[Skurge]

lol, lets try this again. MOST of the reviews could hit 1125 which was the most allowed in the CCC. some reviews could not even hit 1100 though. that makes me wonder just how much voltage it would take to get to a whopping 1325.

Stock is 1.1V, the card that got to 1.5Ghz on LN2 was at 1.17V. So I would guess it would be less than 1.17V

 

[Corporate Thug]

why the 6gb?

 

[Arzachel]

why the 6gb?

6+ screens with AA running on cross/tri/quadfired 7970's? Actually, depending on the dp rate and price, it could be quite the hit for GPGPU, compute apps like lots of vram.

 

[blackened23]

why the 6gb?

eyefinity 6.

 

[SirPauly]

Looks impressive and a nice showcase for AMD's architecture.

 

[lavaheadache]

This is awesome, Now I wonder what kind of price premium those clock speeds are going to fetch.

 

[SirPauly]

Some may feel that because the 7970 may be a harvested part is some-how a slap but to me, it shows that there may be much more head-room for this architecture through clocking and potentially a fully enabled core -- bodes well for future higher performing sku's, which is welcomed.

 

[tigersty1e]

those are some gaudy numbers there.

 

[Arkadrel]

I cant help but think that GCN was a good move on AMDs part.

Their new architecture was needed, and the VLIW4-5 thingy wasnt work well anymore.

Games would run either very well, or totally crappy on VLIW4-5 depending on optimisations, the GCN has much less lee-way in performance than the VLIW arch did. Plus this allowed them to really up their Compute performance.

factor in how poorly their previous cards scaled with overclocking, vs how well the now scale.... Even with new arch and big driver performance gains to come, these cards still do well comsidering their performance/size, and performance/watt is still under check.

 

[zebrax2]

lol, lets try this again. MOST of the reviews could hit 1125 which was the most allowed in the CCC. some reviews could not even hit 1100 though. that makes me wonder just how much voltage it would take to get to a whopping 1325.

Some cards not reaching 1100 doesn't mean that the others wouldn't not reach 1325 without some crazy voltage. Also the chips on this card would probably be cherry picked.

 

[Grooveriding]

The overclock scaling is awesome. I think the last AMD card I had that scaled well with overclocking was my x1900xt, but that took voltage to get anywhere worthwhile.

The 1325core clocked 7970 will be 30% faster than a stock 7970, awesome as 1300core was the magic number for me. Seeing that unnamed 2304 shader part leaves me wondering on when that will arrive though.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

If past performance is any indicator of future performance then an over-pci-e spec AMD card is more likely to take more volts than one from, say, the green team. At least, the AMD card is less likely to turn into a yule log.

This is one way that smaller dies are helping AMD because there is less silicon to generate heat.

 

[Smartazz]

I wonder what the 2304 shader part would be called? Maybe 7980 since 7990 will likely denote the dual card unless AMD goes back to X2.

 

[RaistlinZ]

So will all these variants be available on Jan 9th? If reference cards are going to be BIOS locked at 1125Mhz cap I might just wait and pay more for something like these Sapphire cards.

 

[Hauk]

Stock pcb and associated power delivery tested thus far. Could a closer to perfect pcb/power/cooling offering yield such results? Damn nice prospect! I wish vendors could do whatever they could manage from launch day on.

 

[blackened23]

Latest rumors indicate that some CUs on the tahiti pro chip are disabled, in order to get it to market faster. This also means that AMD will be ready for nvidias next offering, as AMD is very likely (99% chance) of releasing a tahiti pro refresh with higher clockspeeds and lower TDP. This is the same thing nvidia did with Fermi and GTX 480, part of the die was disabled until the 580 was released.

Its basically looking like AMD is ready to fight nvidia using nvidias strategy. Much like nvidia did with the Fermi 5xx refresh.

Should make for an interesting year in GPUs for sure, looks like AMD is ready this time.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Does it bother anyone else that it looks like all of those listed models in the OP's picture, are all SINGLE-LINK DVI? WTH?

Edit: Thanks for the clarification, ddarko.

 

[RavenSEAL]

Jeez, this thing is insane

 

[Firestorm007]

Take my money already AMD! Is it the 9th yet...

 

[Joseph F]

I'll bet that these out-of-the-box 1335MHz versions will be water-cooled.

OK that's it someone on Anandtech better be the first man to reach 1.5ghz on a gpu!!!

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2215910
Way too late on that one. 1.7GHz Core, 8000MHz RAM. (Liquid Nitrogen-cooled)

 

[darckhart]

Does it bother anyone else that it looks like all of those listed models in the OP's picture, are all SINGLE-LINK DVI? WTH?

yea that s-link had be worried, but then I thought about it, and I suppose the dp and hdmi can get me to the magic 120 Hz, so it's all good.

and bring on the 6GB vram!

 

[ArchAngel777]

I'll bet that these out-of-the-box 1335MHz versions will be water-cooled.

If you look at the spec sheet, then I believe you are correct as it denotes it on one of the models (second highest tier) therefore, I would assume the higher model is also a waterblock. Still, this is very promising.

 

[ddarko]

Does it bother anyone else that it looks like all of those listed models in the OP's picture, are all SINGLE-LINK DVI? WTH?

That's either a mistake or the "S" in "S-LINK" stands for something else other than "single." On the Sapphire spec sheet, even the reference design model - "Da Original" - is equipped with an "S-Link DVI" but Anandtech's review of the card explicitly says the DVI connector is dual-link ("There is now a single DL-DVI port, along with an HDMI port and 2 miniDP ports all along a single slot."). The review goes on to talk about how

anyone using the SL-DVI port [emphasis added] will now be fed by the HDMI port. In order to make this transition easier on buyers, AMD will be requiring that partners ship both an HDMI to SL-DVI adaptor and an active miniDP to SL-DVI adaptor with their 7970s

This is confusing and should have been written more clearly but the reference to the SL-DVI port is not to the dual link DVI port that's on the 7970 but the SL-DVI port that was on the 6970/6950 cards but was dropped from the 7970. Folks who were using that second SL-DVI port on the 6900 series cards can use the included adapters. The DVI port that's on the 7970 is dual link.

AMD's spec page for the 7970 also lists the DVI port as "Dual-link DVI with HDCP / Max resolution: 2560x1600":

http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/7000/7970/Pages/radeon-7970.aspx#3