Reviews - Sapphire's monster HD 7970 TOXIC 6GB on three screens

[HEXUS]

Up against Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition and GeForce GTX 680 OC.

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[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Nice review! I like the extra review parameters you have added!

[Jimbo75]

Yep always welcome to have more information. I thought 6GB was overkill and it appears to show it. I think you'd have to throw in MSAA on the cards, or maybe go 3x2560 screens in order to crash the other cards fps total due to lack of framebuffer.

[3930k]

BF3? AC? Radeon beats GeForce? confused!

[Hicks12]

Excellent stuff guys, appreciate the extra effort that went into producing all these figures and its alot more indepth than normal, great to see!.

Must ask though, doesnt the gtx680 implement that triple screen thing where the first monitor has the highest fps and then the other two get halfed ? I remember reading that Nvidia launched that rather odd features, not sure if you could disable it or not.

Any chance of power consumption? be interested to see how much of an effect on power running triple monitors on these bad boys! .

[DLUK]

The correct test for this card would have been 1440p x3 (even 1600px3) or heavy SSAA at 1080px3 then you may have seen a radical difference on tested 4-6GB cards. or Hexus could cough up for a 4k screen?

Card would have to be in Sli or CF for that sort of res but people who cough up for 3x £400-900+ screens or a single £7k screen are not too scared of a £1k GPU bill.

You could have pushed another 3GB 7970 to same clocks as 6GB model to test the sub 33MS output even at 1080p.

[DETHNDESTRUCTN]

I don't understand why you just keep saying you're wondering how much the 6GB frame buffer is being used unless I missed where you actually measured.

I don't know about other programs but I know for sure MSI afterburner provides the feature to measure the exact memory usage on the card, then you could provide hard data to see if more than 3GB is ever even used(or even more than 2GB for that matter).

I have a 6950 2GB and playing BF3 at 5760x1080 at low-medium takes up between 1.7 and 1.9 of my 2GB memory.

[Noxvayl]

Nice review, loving the new per-frame results being shown. I think pure FPS results are meaningless unless you know how often the FPS dips, possibly causing stutter, or how many frames are coming out slower than needed.

The extra effort put in is appreciated.

[HalloweenJack]

please please can you add the 4gb gtx 680!! PLEASE!!

[Tarinder]

Thanks for the suggestion, DETHNDESTRUCTN. We've used Afterburner in the past but don't feel 100 percent sure that what it reports is genuinely the case in play. The framebuffer, as reported by the app, is significantly different between two Radeon HD 7970 3GB cards - the reference and a Sapphire one - so including these framebuffer-use numbers may paint a confusing picture. We'll look into it further, though.

[Tarinder]

please please can you add the 4gb gtx 680!! PLEASE!!

We have an EVGA GTX 680 Classified 4GB en-route to us for precisely this purpose.

[HalloweenJack]

love you long time

so many posters around the internet are advocating the 4gb over the 2gb because `some games use more than 2gb` its silly really

[Domestic_Ginger]

love you long time

so many posters around the internet are advocating the 4gb over the 2gb because `some games use more than 2gb` its silly really

Maybe not today, maybe not .........