XFX’s Radeon HD 7970 Black Edition Double Dissipation: The First Semi-Custom 7970
by Ryan Smith on January 9, 2012 6:00 AM ESTFinal Words
Being the first mover in any market has its advantages, and this is especially true for XFX’s Radeon HD 7970 Black Edition Double Dissipation. While there’s nothing here we haven’t seen in the past on other video cards – a custom cooler and a moderate factory overclock – for the time being XFX is the only vendor offering either of those. Not surprisingly the Black Edition Double Dissipation appears to have sold out over at Newegg before our NDA even expired.
At this point in time XFX’s biggest advantage is that they’re the only vendor offering an open air cooler. There are obvious tradeoffs in these designs and it’s definitely not suited for everyone, but for cases that can handle the heat load of an open air cooler, XFX’s Double Dissipation cooler makes the resulting card significantly quieter than the reference design under load, offering the performance of a 7970 with less noise than any current high-end card. The only thorn in XFX’s side here is that their idle noise is a bit high, something I suspect they’ll fix on their first fully custom card when they can program in a more fitting fan profile.
Meanwhile XFX’s factory overclock gives the Black Edition Double Dissipation a distinct edge over the reference 7970 and any cards at similar clockspeeds, but I don’t believe this is as a significant advantage for the Black Edition Double Dissipation as its cooler. There’s plenty of evidence that most if not all 7970s can reach XFX’s factory overclock, so you’re effectively paying for the privilege of having those speeds pre-burnt into the BIOS. Not that there isn’t a place for a factory overclock, but unless you’re absolutely sheepish about doing it yourself, there’s probably nothing here you can’t do on your own. At best an argument can be made that by grabbing a pre-binned card you can expect a better aftermarket overclock – and you’ll absolutely want to do some overclocking of your own as we were able to get another 125MHz out of our sample.
Of course XFX isn’t giving this away for free – the Black Edition Double Dissipation comes at a $50 premium making it a $599 card, and the notable absence of the active miniDP to SL-DVI adaptor means you’d need to shell out another $25 to build a kit at parity to most other vendors' 7970 kits. Nevertheless XFX has generally earned their price premium. If you were satisfied with the reference 7970’s performance for its price, then the Black Edition Double Dissipation is not far off that curve, though at the end of the day it’s a factory overclocked card and you are definitely paying a premium for that.
With that said, if you’re looking to save a buck we’d suggest keeping your eyes open for the non-Black Edition version of the Double Dissipation card in the future. Without the factory overclock it should be a bit cheaper than the Black Edition, conferring the same advantages of the open air cooler without quite the price premium.
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Duraz0rz - Monday, January 9, 2012 - link
I don't think GCN, a completely new architecture, would qualify as an "old graphics solution".Morg. - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - link
1. yes no reason to go further than a good 5850 right now . (I still have a 4850 and it's just gone into the 'bit too shitty' zone for me)2. 6950 murders a 5850, and the new 7-series does the same to the 6-series.
3. The architecture just changed on AMD side, towards more of a vector processor, just like nVidia's Fermi, this is a good thing for compute and the future of IT in general (heterogeneous core blabla and stuff). (by the way, GCN is not all that new, it's just an adaptation of an older design)
4. Obviously, all that power is becoming a bit useless to gamers since game devs have shifted most of their focus to consoles, and the last big PC game dev (blizzard) focuses on delivering "playable" games for everyone, thus limiting the computing requirements.
5. This is 2011, You can expect that shading and tesselation will eventually enable games to look as good as your hardware can make them, with graphics settings limited to how many FPS minimum and average you want. This is especially true since future consoles will have some of that . and the next round even more.
I'd expect that kind of stuff to be mainstream around 2013 - 2014, so if you're going to keep your new box for 3 years, why not ... (on the other hand, the best graphics board for money currently still is the 6950 of course...).
And .. the tiny bit of truth : yes the gtx 580 is what the 480 was meant to be, with quite a few glitches fixed. It's obviously not meant for a 40nm process (500+ Watts in basic overclocking is a bit much) and that was part of nVidia's strategy : develop fermi on 40 nm then port it to its intended size : 28nm.
AMD waited for 28nm and I believe that was the best choice, seeing how they managed to deliver (much more easily than Fermi by the way .. which had major issues for its first release).. Just looking at the power requirements for the 7970 tells the whole story . That thing is downclocked to hell just to remain under 300 Watts ...
theprodigalrebel - Monday, January 9, 2012 - link
Should come with a warning: No motorboating the cardIceDread - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - link
I purchased XFX radeon hd 5970 a couple of years ago. XFX are inferior when it comes to overclocking. They were more restrictive and values had to be adjusted each restart even if I remember correctly.The result was that everyone who wanted to overclock their xfx cards installed firmware from other companies to successfully be able to overclock their cards.
piroroadkill - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - link
This was true for me, too. I had an XFX 4890 (which is dying now, despite running at stock for a long time).It had a custom (and worse) vrm section of the board, and didn't overclock worth a single damn. Those promises of 1GHz 4890s? Haha, not if you owned one of these.
Mjello - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - link
Is it possible to control the fan manually. That would fix the idle noice easilywifiwolf - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - link
The article stated it's already at its minimum rate since it's using the same controller as the reference card.fausto412 - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - link
Can we get more detail info on this newly added tech?I read the AMD whitepaper buy I am curious as to real world impact of it.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - link
Actually PowerTune is not new. It was first introduced on Cayman (6900 series); the Tahiti (7900 series) implementation is no different.http://www.anandtech.com/show/4061/amds-radeon-hd-...
dcompart - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - link
It'd be nice to see the overclock performance of a standard cooled card for comparison. I'd like to be able to balance the price justification not only on noise but performance. The comparison between a regular 7970 against a stock overclocked card doesn't persuade me, then it irritates me further to see the XFX overclocked further, without even playing devils advocate and showing the overclock potential of a regular 7970 with standard cooling. It doesn't make want to buy the Overclocked card, it makes me feel deceived!