Reviews - AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB

[HEXUS]

New architecture, new tricks, new beginnings.

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[aussieANON]

can someone pass the tissues? i made a mess...

[wasabi]

Look forward to the update on ZeroCore. If they can get this right it would be a big win for bods like me who want to leave the PC on 24/7 but not chew through electricity unnecessarily.

[Tattysnuc]

Great to see AMD's engineers continuing to excel! Bravo sirs. Top notch review especially considering the short notice nature of the NDA lifting. Well done Hexus!!!!!

As for the product, I'm sticking with my GTX 480's until the next system upgrade. Don;t think this offers anything new to the fight, just does it much better.

[Brewster0101]

Great to see AMD's engineers continuing to excel!

I think the 'ATI' engineers probably don't want to be associated with AMD engineers.

While ATI - cough AMD GPU engineers are kicking out good things, the AMD - cough AMD CPU engineers are not doing the AMD brand so proud.

Anyhoo, lovely specs, lovely stats - ups the hype for the middle range models.

[shaithis]

Nice but yet again it looks like I am going to have to go nVidia as they are the only ones who are willing to ramp up the TDP a bit to make a beastly card :S

[Phage]

Nice but yet again it looks like I am going to have to go nVidia as they are the only ones who are willing to ramp up the TDP a bit to make a beastly card :S

Confused - What does the NV card do more than the ATi ?

Looking forward to seeing this in the anandtech GPU bench to see how it performs against the multi-GPU setups.

[kalniel]

Nice but yet again it looks like I am going to have to go nVidia as they are the only ones who are willing to ramp up the TDP a bit to make a beastly card :S

You aren't interested in the 7990 then?

[shaithis]

No, CFX and SLI are yukk!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

If you look at the Hardware Canucks review it is consistently faster than a GTX580 3GB:

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...review-12.html

Computer and tesselation performance is generally better than a GTX580:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/a...7970-review/22

If you look on a few forums,some people are complaining that the HD7970 had "dissapointing" performance and is "overpriced" even though this faster than a GTX580 3GB! The vast majority of GTX580 3GB cards are in the same price range as the HD7970,ie, blooming expensive!!

TBH,the HD7950 3GB will be the more interesting card from the HD7900 series IMHO.

On top of this compute performance seems to be better. It seems to be a huge improvement in performance over an HD6970. It will be interesting when the Trinity sucessor uses the GCN architecture for the IGP!!

[keithwalton]

The only important metric to me is it's hash rate running bitcoin. AMD gpu's have been king of the hill at doing this for the last few generations due to the sheer number of shaders. I suspect the new architecture will require a lot of tweaking to get the most out of it

[3dcandy]

improvements in nearly every sphere and people still complain that they'd rather chew through some more watts for no extra performance? confused!?!?!?!

anyway, give it a few weeks and there will be BIOS mods that will push it much further, remember it still has the BIOS switch so you can flash a custom BIOS and switch back at will...

[shaithis]

improvements in nearly every sphere and people still complain that they'd rather chew through some more watts for no extra performance? confused!?!?!?!

Er, no. If it used more power they could ramp it higher, actually giving 580 users a reason to upgrade.....as it is, I am looking (based on the hexus numbers) at a 4 FPS increase....so no point in upgrading.

Great if your buying a new fancy card....but really disappointing when you've had a GTX580 for a year and you know that AMD could have made a 580 killer.

[3dcandy]

sooooo - no driver improvements, no tweaks, lot better performance per watt at launch doesn't interest you? I do get what you're saying, but it took 6 months at least for this kind of architecture to come good from NV, will you change your mind in 6 months when that 4 fps is more like 30? And, overclocks will likely be able to hit 1ghz+ with these, so you'll be looking at another increase. Just because it's not a stupendous performance increase immediately it's a much better card than what you own currently....also has 3gb of memory. Some people are never happy...lol

[cjs150]

I am not an enthusiast, a 560 Ti is fine for me, but everytime a new high level card comes out, improvements filter down within 3-4 months to the cards people like me want. So next gen of the cards I buy will be 20% faster on average - good news.

Now all I have to do is stick a water block on one of these and no noise to worry about either!

[j.o.s.h.1408]

when will a waterblock come out for this card?