come on now. you expect a much bigger chip to boost to 1150 mhz at same TDP. for the same 250w TDP clocks will be lower. i expect 925 mhz core clocks with 975 mhz max boost. voltage around 1.175v. that should allow overclocks to 1125 mhz easily.
Reference 7970 925mhz (1.175V) peaks at
189W
Reference 7970 flashed with GE bios (1.256V) peaks at 238W
13.5% increase in GPU clock speed and 9.1% increase in memory clock cost AMD 49W of power.
But if you look at after-market 7970 cards, you have 2 possibilities - same 1050mhz clocks at way lower power consumption, or way higher clocks at similar power consumption to reference 7970Ghz:
(A) 1050mhz card that peaks at
181W (8W lower than reference card despite a 13.5 increase in GPU clock and a 3.6% increase in memory clock)
(B) 1180mhz card that peaks at
239W
^
27.6% increase in GPU clock for only a 50W increase because the card uses upgraded PCB, power/VRM circuitry, higher quality components and heatsink. This all lowers your power consumption.
In either case you can see that using 250W TDP of "Reference 7970Ghz" tells us nothing about 9970. For the last 1.5 years it's been a waste of time to talk about Reference 7970 GHz power consumption since:
1) No such cards are sold in retail and never have been;
2) Every after-market 7970 Ghz shows way better efficiency than reference 7970Ghz.
Take nearly 2 year old 28nm tech, AMD may improve components/PCB, cooler and you end up with a > 1Ghz 9970 card and die size of 440-450mm2 that uses
250W of actual power. Remember some after-market 7970 1050mhz cards use just 181W of power, giving AMD
69W of actual power to work with. Add in more efficient GDDR5 at similar clocks, which means they can go 7Ghz GDDR5 without increasing power consumption compared to 6Ghz.
2560 SPs + 40 ROPs + 160 TMUs @ 1150mhz @ 1.175V.
Shader power, GLOPs, pixel fill-rate, texture fill-rate
all equally go up 37%.
Why is this not possible?
Remember TDP =! actual power consumption for AMD. We already have HIS 7970 hitting 1180mhz @ 1.256V while using 239W actual power with 0 process node improvements.
