AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Review: Battling For The Performance Crown
by Ryan Smith on June 22, 2012 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- GCN
- Radeon HD 7000
OC: Power, Temperature, & Noise
Our final task is our look at the 7970GE’s overclocking capabilities. As the 7970GE is based on the existing 7970 we aren’t expecting any significant changes, however it’s reasonable to expect that general manufacturing process improvements over the last 6 months will have pushed yields and tolerances a little higher, giving us just a bit more headroom.
At the same time the presence of the boost clock and its associated voltage is going to change overclocking as well. The higher voltage should lend itself to higher overclocks, meanwhile validating overclocks is also going to be a bit harder as now we need to make sure neither the overclocked base clock/voltage combination or the overclocked boost clock/voltage combination is unstable, similar to the extra effort needed to overclock the GTX 680 series.
| Radeon HD 7970 Series Overclocking | |||||
| Ref 7970GE | Ref 7970 | XFX 7970 BEDD | |||
| Shipping Core Clock | 1000MHz | 925MHz | 1000MHz | ||
| Shipping Max Boost Clock | 1050MHz | N/A | N/A | ||
| Shipping Memory Clock | 6GHz | 5.5GHz | 5.7GHz | ||
| Shipping Max Voltage | 1.218v | 1.175v | 1.175v | ||
| Overclock Core Clock | 1150MHz | 1100MHz | 1125MHz | ||
| Overclock Max Boost Clock | 1200MHz | N/A | N/A | ||
| Overclock Memory Clock | 6.4GHz | 6.3GHz | 6.3GHz | ||
| Overclock Max Boost Voltage | 1.218v | 1.175v | 1.175v | ||
After going through the full validation process we were able to hit an overclock of +150MHz, which pushed our base clock from 1000MHz to 1150MHz, and our boost clock from 1050MHz to 1200MHz. Depending on how you want to count this overclock amidst the presence of the boost clock this is either 25MHz better than our best 7970 card, or 75MHz better. In either case our 7970GE definitely overclocks better than our earlier 7970 cards but not significantly so, which is in-line with our expectations.
As with any overclocking effort based on a single sample our overclocking results are not going to be representative of what every card can do, but they are reasonable. With AMD now binning chips for the 7970GE we’d expect to see some stratification among the 7970 family such that high overclocking chips that would previously show up in 7970 cards will now show up in 7970GE cards instead. For penny-pinching overclockers this is not good news, but for more hardcore overclockers this is nothing new as AMD’s partners have been doing something similar with their factory overclocked cards for some time now.
Meanwhile our memory overclock isn’t significantly different from what we could pull off with the reference 7970. The limitation is the memory bus or Tahiti’s memory controller, neither of which has changed. After around 6.4GHz errors start catching up and performance gains become performance losses.
Moving on to our performance charts, we’re going to once again start with power, temperature, and noise, before moving on to gaming performance. We’ll be testing our 7970 cards with the PowerTune limit set to +20% in order to avoid any real possibility of being performance limited by PowerTune.
With the 7970GE’s already high load power, overclocking and raising the PowerTune limits isn’t doing it any favors when it comes to overclocking. On the contrary to being a free overclock power consumption now exceeds even the GTX 690 in all situations and power consumption is almost certainly in excess of 300W at the card level. As we’ll see in our gaming performance section we’re definitely getting more performance out of the 7970GE, but we’re paying for it with power.
With a rise in power consumption comes a rise in temperatures to a varying degree. At 83C under Metro the 7970GE has gotten warmer, but not significantly so. The same cannot be said for OCCT. At 89C we’re approaching the reasonable limits for this card and cooler.
The 7970GE was already loud at stock and overclocking it doesn’t help. Under Metro noise is now at 63.8dBA, and under OCCT it’s tied with the 6990 for noise at 66dBA. Even if you’re forgiving of noise, this is reaching the point where it’s going to be difficult to ignore. Serious 7970GE overclockers will want to seek other cards and/or aftermarket coolers.
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raghu78 - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
Correct. for gaming at the highest settings on ultra high resolution single monitor and multi monitor configurations there is only one leader in the market. Its the Radeon HD 7970 Ghz edition.http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canu...
Look at the 2560x 1600 extreme and 5760 x 1080 perf average. The HD 7970 Ghz edition is faster .
From the review
"In our opinion and with all other things being equal, the HD 7970 GHz Edition is the card to have for ultra high resolution gaming"
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
From the review: " What we have here is a statistical tie so the consumer’s performance-oriented choice will ultimately come down to brand preference."Yes, of course.... cherry picking again... so take a hot loud, housefire electrical sucking earth destroying sack of driver crap... it's the best card, of course...
That's great... all the penny pinchers here are right on it, I'm sure...
silverblue - Monday, June 25, 2012 - link
Fermi?Low blow, I admit.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, June 26, 2012 - link
The FERMI's performance blew the amd card to shreds.In this case, the house fire amd card sucks the low end of everything, an epic fail on every single metric, and amd has crap for compute software support so they lose there as well, just like any card loses when their driver software sucks in games.
Worse yet, amd often takes years to fix anything, if ever...then drops support.
Fermi WON when it "insulted you".
Housefire amd loses everything - total freakin LOSER.
raghu78 - Tuesday, June 26, 2012 - link
FYI there are reviews showing much bigger winshttp://www.hardware.fr/articles/869-18/recapitulat...
10 - 12% perf lead . So its not as simple as you think. The fact of the matter is Nvidia GTX 680 is losing the majority of games - Deus Ex, Alan Wake, Anno 2070, Crysis 2, Witcher 2, Witcher 2 EE, Dirt 3, Skyrim, Dirt Showdown, Crysis Warhead, Metro 2033. Also the margins in some of the games is very big - Dirt Showdown (50%), Crysis Warhead (15 - 25% depending on resolution) , Metro 2033 (20%), Witcher 2 (20%) , Anno (15%). Nvidia's wins in Shogun 2 clearly. BF3 is not a consistent win when you compare many reviews. Even Batman AC which runs better on GTX 680 with FXAA , runs faster on HD 7970 Ghz edition with 8X MSAA. So its clearly a case of you being in denial mode. so go on keep ridiculing others if that makes you happy.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, June 26, 2012 - link
Hey fanboy, your summary page shows the 680 at their weighted average special importance to each game 127 frames, and 7970, 127 frames.LOL - Amazing how you got 20% and 50% from EQUAL.
I tell you, the lies and spinning exceed political debate norms.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, June 26, 2012 - link
From your link, Dirt Showdown, where you have just claimed a 50% lead for 7970..." If the GeForce GTX 680 Radeon HD 7970 equals 1080p without advanced lighting, when it activated its dive performance, Nvidia does not have access to this patch soon enough that in order to propose specific optimizations. It will probably take one to two weeks for this to be corrected."
Let's see 0% or a tie = amd ahead by 50% !!!! according to raghu
LOL - I guess it's all in your heads - not even the reviewers own words can rallte the fantasies of amd out of control fanboys.
http://translate.google.pl/translate?hl=pl&sl=...
I'd say you're trolling but i think the fanboy and lack of intellect has you "doing what you believed was correct".
I could be wrong here, for the 1st time ever, though.
meloz - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
Excellent review, Ryan!Performance is great, but the noise is a big issue. I hope in future manufacturers pay more attention to this aspect.
kyuu - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
The 7970GE isn't a card to buy with a reference cooling solution, obviously. With custom cooling solutions, the noise/temp won't be an issue. It's doubtful you'll see many, if any, manufacturers even release this card with the reference cooler.CeriseCogburn - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
So amd sucks, but it's all good.Maybe that should be their new pr slogan.