AMD Radeon HD 7970 3 GB

[W1zzard]

Today AMD launches their new Radeon HD 7970. The card is based on brand-new 28 nanometer silicon which promises reduced power consumption. Another important change is AMD's move to a new shader architecture, enabling increased performance, easier design of future products and more efficient rendering.

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[v12dock]

Excellent review excellent card!

 

[Darkleoco]

Loving the looks of this card, can't wait to see aftermarket versions and what overclocks will come standard.

 

[Volkszorn88]

The performance definitely justifies the price. God, can't even imagine two of these bad boys.

A GTX580 killer for sure. Not to mention with future drivers to increase the performance even more!

 

[legends84]

nice.. hope to see real performance if this card test on pciE 3.0 mobo..

 

[Darkleoco]

The performance definitely justifies the price. God, can't even imagine two of these bad boys.

A GTX580 killer for sure. Not to mention with feature drivers to increase the performance even more!

Makes me want to go grab a job specifically to crossfire a pair of these and build a new rig for my 6950's

 

[W1zzard]

nice.. hope to see real performance if this card test on pciE 3.0 mobo..

there wont be any significant performance increase from going pcie 3.0. i rather picked a platform for testing that people actually use. sb-e doesn't seem to be very popular so far.

 

[v12dock]

aftermarket cooler >15% + matured chip manufacturing = performance increase >30% faster the 580 @ 1080p

 

[bear jesus]

Great review as always wizz

I think the 7970 looks like a pretty good option to replace my 6970 and give a nice FPS boost in eyefinity.

It seams odd to look at a blank GPU chip in a review, is this how all the 7970's will be or is this just something to do with being very early samples or any other reason?

Oh an holy crap at the almost 330gb/s overclocked memory bandwidth I had no expectation for the memory to clock so high, even more so as the review pointed out the chips are only specified to run at 1500 MHz, is there any reason you know of that would have allowed for the really high clocks or is it just the usual luck of the draw?

 

[W1zzard]

the chips are only specified to run at 1500 MHz, is there any reason you know of that would have allowed for the really high clocks or is it just the usual luck of the draw?

not sure to be honest. will have to test more cards to get a clearer picture

 

[christian27]

Man, i cant wait to see factory overclocked cards with core clock beyond 1GHZ.

 

[stinger608]

Great review as always wizz

the review pointed out the chips are only specified to run at 1500 MHz, is there any reason you know of that would have allowed for the really high clocks or is it just the usual luck of the draw?

not sure to be honest. will have to test more cards to get a clearer picture

I sometimes think that the majority of the review samples, especially early samples, are more or less "golden" samples. Later on, once the cards have gone retail things many times change. If you look at sites that have gotten different review samples before something actually goes retail they will usually do better than after retail has gone live.

Of course this is not always the case.

 

[gorillagarrett]

It's 20%-30% faster than the gtx580/6970 in games.It does consume less power on both load and idle than the 6970 though, which isn't half bad..

Over 60 average fps in BF3 on ultra with that 4x MSAA is also nice.The Unigine heaven results are amazing; this thing is a geometry monster.

Now, I can buy a 6950 for less than half the price, unlock it to 6970, and play Bf3 maxed out with SMAA instead of the heavy MSAA at +60fps, which makes this porduct half as atractive as the 6950.

 

[alexsubri]

THANK YOU W1ZZ! BEEN WAITING FOR THIS!

 

[DannibusX]

Ok, gonna need to grab a couple of these.

Thanks for the review, W1z!

 

[Delta6326]

Awesome review!! Sweet card! Can't beat that Performance/Power ratio! This is defiantly a worthy from my 2x 4850.

To bad these are so loud, but this is just stock I always buy a custom GPU.

And it looks like I was right about it being $550

US pricing should be around$520-550

 

[mad1394]

Thank you for the review. Hopefully nvidia is strapped in tight cuz amd is taking them on one hell of a ride.

 

[gorillagarrett]

Ok, gonna need to grab a couple of these.

Thanks for the review, W1z!

A couple of these to play what mate? Honestly!!! If we had those sexy pixel-dense OLED monitors available, it would have made some sense.

 

[alexsubri]

My 5850's are going on sale come Feb 2012

 

[TheMailMan78]

Great review. Not the kinda jump I wanted in performance but good enough I guess. Sucks about the price. Anyway how did you bench BF3?

 

[entropy13]

perf/$ it's -10%, -3%, -2%, 1% and 7% compared to the GTX 580. It's only "worth it" in 2560x1600.

 

[MxPhenom 216]

I am loving the power consumption to performance ratio. I want to see the HD7950!

 

[Hayder_Master]

Ohh yeah first 7970 real review by TPU, that's great.

Cool to see it it's beat GTX580, but price should be less

 

[theJesus]

Great review. Not the kinda jump I wanted in performance but good enough I guess. Sucks about the price. Anyway how did you bench BF3?

This. It's only $50 more than the 580 though, but on some of those games it just barely beats it. Certainly not worth upgrading if you already have a 580. At least not yet. Maybe with driver optimizations and nice factory overclocks, custom PCBs and coolers, etc.

Anyways, nice review as always.

 

[TheMailMan78]

This. It's only $50 more than the 580 though, but on some of those games it just barely beats it. Certainly not worth upgrading if you already have a 580. At least not yet. Maybe with driver optimizations and nice factory overclocks, custom PCBs and coolers, etc.

Anyways, nice review as always.

Ill tell ya I wanted a 4850 vs 5850 kinda jump over the 69xx series. To me the 7970 is over priced to play console ports and the performance is meh IMO. I guess I'm just hoping for to much anymore. I mean 550 bucks for a GPU is a lil steep in todays economy.

Anyways W1zz's review is top notch as always.