Re:
I suspect the selling points of the new 7970 rebrand aka RX9-280, is the following:
1. Possible OC room is around 10% to 30%; stock core frequencies is at 1265 MHZ Turbo, so we are looking at a OC frequencies band of around 1430 MHZ to 1644.5 MHZ Core speeds, +/- 75 MHz, with a water block cooling solution. This will jump to 5.857 GFLOPs to 6.73 GFLOPs. Turbo speed already surpasses the 5.0GFLOP mark.
2. Speculation: AFR and Frame Pacing will be handle by Hardware components on the PCB like the GTX Titan and 780...
SP doesn't change. More than likely, they are using Tahiti GPU cores with even smaller leakage and better binning like the Premium 7970 variants, in the previous generation, with additional tweaks and razzle dazzle.
If I am not mistaken, Matrix is ROG or near it in quality. It has the potential to OC high for about the same or less internal energy. DCII or Direct Cooling V.2.0 is like a downgrade from Matrix.
If people are wondering why rebrand the 7970. It's quite simple. Half-baked Maxewell and Tenefire 2.0 will be out in mid 2014. RX9-280 is just a filler card for a certain key market. RX9-290, is the experiement that AMD is pulling this year until Tenefire 2.0. The experiement is Mantle, TrueAudio, and Crossfire through the PCIe Lanes...
,,, for cpu and motherboard cooling
