Be very wary about the 7970ghz. I do not want to sound like a nvidia fanboy so let me explain why.
I bought 2 $600 7970 vapor x sapphire cards with 6gb vram. I was all excited to have what was the fastest card on the market with enough vram to play a heavily modded skyrim at triple monitor res. However, I was not getting anywheres near the performance I thought I should be with games. All of the benchmarks said these were the fastest single gpu cards on the market. I went and got an rma figuring they were defective but had the same exact problems. I decided to do some further tests and found when I removed a card I got about the same amount of fps in most games. The ones I tested were skyrim, far cry 3, hitman absolution, sleeping dogs, crysis 3 beta, gtaiv, tf2 (just for fun lol) metro 2033, and the witcher. Out of all of those games the only ones that scaled in crossfire were sleeping dogs, and hitman. With far cry 3 I got 10 more fps but when the average at the settings I was on was 40 that is an unacceptable difference for another 600 dollars. So, Basically AMD drivers are prehistoric and if you go crossfire you will not be getting an acceptable level of performance until much time after the game is released, and only if it is a triple a title. Additionally, the microstutter was tremendous in crossfire, and even present yet fully playable with one card. Another reason these sucked is because of cthe terrible coil whine but that was probably a sapphire problem. I have seen a bunch of people online having problems with AMD drivers too. Take the words "fastest single gpu card on the market" with a grain of salt. If a runner A can reach 1mph faster speeds than another runner B but then dies down much slower before picking back up again while runner b is keeping a much steadier pace, then it is kind of like the 7970 vs the 680. Even though the 7970 has better avg fps on a graph it is much less playable because you get such bad fps drops you may as well be playing at 20 fps. Nvidia has adaptive vsync which below 60 fps helps eliminate micro stutter and random fps drops to nothing at all.
And, all of these people telling you that you will destroy any game out right now with one card is an idiot. I will present you a list of games that are one hundred percent unplayable with two 7970 ghz cards at max settings 1080p:
Hitman Absolution
Far Cry 3
Metro 2033
Witcher 2
Crysis 3
Skyrim with lots of grass and an enb mod
To be honest that is the majority of my games. I could probably find a whole bunch more if i owned more.
I do not approve of this practice, but somehow nvidia usually get AAA developers to better optimize games for their cards on launch (Bf3, Skyrim, Far Cry 3 [which was even an AMD never settle bundle game lol], crysis 2 all ran much better on nvidia cards at launch.) With the economic state amd is in they do not have the funds to curve this. They will likely only exist in the future as a simple roadblock so that nvidia cannot literally charge whatever they want even though they will still be pretty far ahead of amd. So you will probably only get more shitty launches and driver updates in the future.
LONG STORY SHORT: AMD + terrible drivers + microstutter + bad game launch performance + taking forever to get crossfire to work in many AAA games which kind of goes along with drivers + there economic state likely supporting this in the future=you should probably go nvidia.
If you do not believe me try an AMD card yourself and if you do not get those problems then just keep it. I suggest buying 2 cards now and returining one after your testing is done just so that you can see the crossfire problems which was one of the biggest issues. You will probably do it later down the road if not now.
As for me, I have 2 680 classifieds coming in the mail and am very excited as when my friend let me try out his on my machine they were absolutely amazing!
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram