AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Review: Give Me Back That Crown!

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Interesting results on the WinZip and VCE tests. With such little utilization on the WinZip benchmark is that indicative that the massively parallel processing on the GPU is THAT much of a benefit to compression that it barely needs to be used, or that CPUs just need a little more oomph to do the same thing?

As for VCE, yeah, that's just, uh . . . yeah.



Agree. I know people want to see the biggest and baddest, but when you're already at 50+ fps on ultramaximumcrazy details, does it really matter that one card might be 3% faster than another? Once a card passes my "good enough" performance level, heat, noise, and power consumption are the biggest factors to me.

Personally, I'd go with the Radeon this cycle due to the extra compute power.
 
This card is a desperate attempt from AMD a la the 4890. Power consumption and fan noise are piss poor, and overpriced. And you may be able to find a 7950 for $360, but the majority are still $399-$450+.

I'll stick with the GTX 670.
 
[citation][nom]jurassic512[/nom]This card is a desperate attempt from AMD a la the 4890. Power consumption and fan noise are piss poor, and overpriced. And you may be able to find a 7950 for $360, but the majority are still $399-$450+.I'll stick with the GTX 670.[/citation]

There are several 7950s well below the $400 mark, not just the one. Furthermore, you're not accounting for the $100 free three game voucher that you get with the 7950 and 7970. If you don't want them, then you can sell them. Beyond that, non-reference coolers should solve the noise problem. As for the price, well, you can buy the regular 7970 or a 7950 and use the new driver and you'll probably find the 7950 beating the 670 in value (even if you get a $400 model instead of a cheaper model) and performance with an overclocking comparison.
 
With this in the past probably it was better to have a 670 instead of a 680 or a 7970, but now the best choice is this new 7970ghz edition, or even the old 7970 with the new catalyst drivers, anyway 50 bucks over the 670 is a very light difference, making the 7970 worth more than the 2nd hand nvidia's flagship
 
[citation][nom]wasabiman321[/nom]Great I just ordered a gtx 670 ftw... Grrr I hope performance gets better for nvidia drivers too[/citation]

I've had my 670 for a while and I wouldn't trade it (paying the difference of course) in for any of the cards it was pitted against. Not enough performance for the dollar once you pass the 670.
 
this more of a review of the amd 12.7 drivers, which seem to really bump all the 7900 cards ahead of the nvidia cards at higher clocks. this is something been saying for a while, that driver are very likely to completely change the gpu playing field with one update
 
[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]Why can't they do that? If AMD really anted to, I'm sure that they could make a new die. If they want to avoid the binning problems associated with huge dies, then at least theoretically, they could use two dies on a single chip and connect them through a high bandwidth link (maybe an implementation of Hyper-Transport).[/citation]

Altering an architecture to fit in more stream processors, texture units, and etc requires millions of dollars for drawing up the plan, testing, and then modifying the fab machines to build the new dies.

It's cheaper to build a big die and bin it accordingly, because manufacturing is never perfect. You're always going to have flaws ranging from one that requires a little extra voltage to one that only has one functional stream processor.

And the second part of your answer is essentially CrossFire, that's a 7990.
 
[citation][nom]recon-uk[/nom]Love the anti Nvidia crowd thumbing down all my comments... truth hurt?[/citation]

If you're trolling, then I think the down votes are self-explanatory. If not, then I'd have to say that it's your absolutely absurd interpretation of the data that has granted you a wealth of down votes.
 
[citation][nom]cobra5000[/nom]Hail to the >$1000 King, Baby![/citation]

[citation][nom]urban legend[/nom]where, GTX 680 OC'd...?I agree to that.[/citation]

>$1000? The only card that I know of that has a price that is greater than $1K is the GTX 690 and I don't think that the 690 is the main event for this article. Also, there will be 7970 GHz editions that are factory overclocked past 1GHz (somewhat ironically) too. I don't think that the performance crown will be a long-lasting nor a universal title for either company this generation. Overall, the 7970 GHz Edition still wasn't a huge leap ahead of the 670/680 in most games, so it's a win, but I don't think that it's really a huge win, especially when we think about DX11 (which the 7970 GHz Edition still did very well in).
 
[citation][nom]Jaquith[/nom]First, you know exactly what I'm saying... There's nothing 'reference' at all about the 1GHz AMD cards -- What's the difference in specs other than the Clocks?! AMD simply juiced the clocks - period.There's no difference other than the fact you elected to not test/compare say the EVGA GPU's with the 'SOC' (labeled) vs 'GHz Edition' (labeled) GPU's. Anyone can stick an OEM (label) on anything - I'm not that naive. IF you included OC results from comparing say a vanilla HD 7970 (OC) vs 'GHz Edition' HD 7970 then I'd buy into this a tad more, but only if you similarly did same on the GTX 600's. Your choice -- don't get upset if folks call you on it.HD 7970 specs: HD 7970 GHz Edition - http://www.amd.com/US/PRODUCTS/DES [...] GHz.aspx#3HD 7970 Reference - http://www.amd.com/US/PRODUCTS/DES [...] 970.aspx#3GCN Architecture32 Compute Units (2048 Stream Processors)128 Texture Units128 Z/Stencil ROP Units32 Color ROP UnitsDual geometry unitsSAMEThese 'versions' of HD 7970 aren't worth 1 cent more, for FREE use MSI Afterburner and wala (Magic) you have a GHz Edition - http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/download.htmJuiced without even better cooling[/citation]
How can you keep beating this dead horse? Stock GTX 680s clock up to 1200 mhz or so with boost leaving maybe 100 mhz of headroom if you're very lucky. Compared to stock 7970s at 925 mhz how is this fair? Overclocking puts them pretty much equal, GET OVER IT YOU MORON. nvidia is pushing their GPUs to the max stock just to pretend theyre ahead
 
[citation][nom]A Bad Day[/nom]Altering an architecture to fit in more stream processors, texture units, and etc requires millions of dollars for drawing up the plan, testing, and then modifying the fab machines to build the new dies.It's cheaper to build a big die and bin it accordingly, because manufacturing is never perfect. You're always going to have flaws ranging from one that requires a little extra voltage to one that only has one functional stream processor.And the second part of your answer is essentially CrossFire, that's a 7990.[/citation]

They don't need to alter any architecture. The architecture itself remains unchanged. Besides, like I said, AMD could simply take two current dies and add a very wide and high frequency Hyper-Transport connection between them. Why would AMD need to make any changes to the machines for this, yet not need to make changes for making the big die? That doesn't make sense. The second part of mine is not essentially CF, it's different. CF is two separate chips and my what I said is making a dual die chip. It's not the same. It's more power efficient and better-scaling. The 7990 has two separate GPUs, not a single GPU with two dies.

Also, as dies linearly increase in size, the problems associated with binning increase exponentially. This is why AMD dislikes big dies and probably related to why Nvidia didn't want another compute oriented architecture that needs huge dies to be competitive in high-end gaming performance when they made Kepler based video cards.
 

I think it was a typo on HIS part.
 
[citation][nom]hasten[/nom]Well I got one thing out of this article. Blazorthon mindlessly defends AMD and at times seems to make it up as he goes along... a Bulldozer processor has never surpassed any Sandy i5 k or non k in gaming. You even state multiple times that your mod solution only pushes the Bulldozer barely past a PII clock for clock. So what is it? Faster than a Sandy i5 or barely faster than a PII?I struggle with a number of your claims and am no way biased towards Intel/Nvidia.[/citation]

The higher clock frequencies make up for the still inferior performance per Hz. If the 8120 can hit over 4.5GHz on affordable air coolers (supposedly, even the stock cooler can, but even though it cools well, it's loud), then do you really think that it can't go any higher on the same coolers when it only has half of it's cores? It won't cut power usage exactly in half, but it will bring it down substantially and that will leave a lot more headroom for further overclocking. It won't be nearly as power efficient as Sandy Bridge, but it will be similarly performing to the non K edition i5s (even when you over clock them) and that's also important.
 

dead on.
+1000
I have read that article and I have a 2400 and 980BE in-house.

when clocking the 980BE to 4.2 daily and 4.5GHz bench it got beat out every-time by an i5-2400.
in everything.
and Sandra Lite benchmarking breaks it down in detail.

 
I understand why the 7970 is one of Tom's favorites, but the 670 is a bit overrated, you still need to overclock it pretty decently to reach the 680´s field, without counting on the 680´s OC
 
[citation][nom]hasten[/nom]I understand what you are saying, but how high do you have to go until you are reaching equivilant speeds? Don't quote me, but I think I remember seeing a review in which the PII 980 was moderately overclocked (I wanna say 4.5ghz) and it wasn't near meeting the stock 2400 in gaming performance. I couldn't find the article so I may be imagining it, but just looking at stock 3.8ghz (980) vs. stock 2400 @ 3.1ghz, the 2400 is nearly double performance in a number of benchmarks. At it's current price I am extremely tempted to grab the 8120 just to run it through the ropes. I'm curious to see what it can do, I'll try what you are recommending. I'll even throw my Cooler Master Hyper 212 on which would bring it right to the cost of a 2400. The only FX processor I have toyed with was the 4100, which I wasn't extremely impressed with.I reread my original post and feel I came off a bit as an ass. I just noticed what I thought were a few contradictions and a bit of bias towards AMD .[/citation]

I think you're exagerating wayyy too much about SB , I have a 955 BE OCed to 3.8 and a gtx 680, I can show you how close my benchmarks are from those made using i7´s 2600k, so yeah there's a difference but not as huge as you're trying to show
 
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