AMD Radeon HD 7970 Overclocking Performance Review @ [H]

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

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AMD Radeon HD 7970 Overclocking Performance Review - We overclock the Radeon HD 7970 in Overdrive and show you what 1.125GHz of performance looks like. Then, we go to the edge and overclock the voltage and take this GPU past 1.2GHz for stellar overclocked gaming performance. We compare this to an overclocked GeForce GTX 580 and see how performance stacks up.
 
Wow, that is impressive stuff... and good god is the performance crazy there even compared to an oc'd 580. I love it! Looks like it would probably beat out GTX 570 SLI even, at those kinds of speeds, considering how badly it butchers the 580 there at high-res/high-settings?
 
This is a seriously awesome card. Now if only they could release a midrange option to drive down prices of their other cards....
 
Back to F5'ing newegg after seeing this... /cry @ my order getting cancelled from "out of stock" once placed.
 
Ahhh, eyefinity & OC results, this is nice! This is the info I look for at [H].

:eek: up to 80% difference between an overclocked 7970 & overclocked 580 at multi-display resolutions.

That is sweet...!
 
Thanks for doing such a thorough O/C article, I'm sure most of us who have an AMD 7970 order will be maxing out the default Overdrive clocks after this.

On the flipside, more gains can be had with overvoltage, however, where's the aftermarket cooling hydro kits for reference cards?

Imagine a corsair H80 or H100 type of setup but for GPUs.
 
Omg these things have so much overclocking potential. I don't need the performance but I want to get one just to play with it :D
 
Was never impressed with the 7970 stock speeds, but these are very impressive, to say the least.
 
I would love to see how these cards perform while being watercooled.

Given how much heat it generates while OC'ing, it seems like the perfect candidate for watercooling.
 
holy shit cakes batman. ok 2 7970s are def worth replacing 3 6970s when u oc.

The best thing is, Bf3 is playable @ eyefinity rez with a single card. :|
 
Great article like always :D love [H]

Can't wait to see non reference pcb's that'll push the core past 1300mhz

this article is for all the ppl who were saying 20% over a stock 580gtx wasn't enough ....

30% over itself @ 1.2ghz :eek: madness! ....well the good kind of madness ...
 
"In addition, we had to manually set the fan to 75% to keep the GPU cool enough. At 75% the fan was very loud and annoying, but it allowed us to achieve this high overclock"

lol, no thank you on the 1260mhz oc. I personally would just stick with the much quieter 1125mhz oc.
 
cannondale06 said:
"In addition, we had to manually set the fan to 75% to keep the GPU cool enough. At 75% the fan was very loud and annoying, but it allowed us to achieve this high overclock"

lol, no thank you on the 1260mhz oc. I would just stick with the much quieter 1125mhz oc.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'll hope my individual card can manage a little lower volts and 1200-1225mhz maybe... seems all of them hit 1150ish on stock volts though so I'll be happy even if that's all I can run with sane noise levels. :D
 
Impressive indeed.

say I owned a 5970 and have a very poor opinion of AMD drivers, would I be wise to wait for GTX 580 price drops? seeing how this piece performs/overclock, more than 400$ for a GTX 580 seems irrelevant.
 
It is good to see AMD stepping up the game again, and with lower power draws. This is truly impressive.
 
Mandor said:
Impressive indeed.

say I owned a 5970 and have a very poor opinion of AMD drivers, would I be wise to wait for GTX 580 price drops? seeing how this piece performs/overclock, more than 400$ for a GTX 580 seems irrelevant.
Click to expand...

I would say a 580 price drop will probably happen when AMD releases the 7950 or 7870 which will be more competitors to the 580.
 
cannondale06 said:
"In addition, we had to manually set the fan to 75% to keep the GPU cool enough. At 75% the fan was very loud and annoying, but it allowed us to achieve this high overclock"

lol, no thank you on the 1260mhz oc. I personally would just stick with the much quieter 1125mhz oc.
Click to expand...

Yeah, agreed. I want to hear my games, not my fans. ;) Here's hoping that the overclocked Sapphire ones that are coming out will be fairly quiet. If it is, I'm buying that, unless Nvidia can counter with a competitive card in the very near future. And I'll buy two of the Sapphire overclocked ones, if I see that AMD has improved their crossfire driver situation. I'll be eyeing that with a microscope in the upcoming weeks/months.
 
Kinda curious as to why if these OC so easily they didn't clock them higher from the outset. Unless they're being lazy and want to have their 6 month refresh built in by just upping the clocks without any effort required.
 
bildad said:
Kinda curious as to why if these OC so easily they didn't clock them higher from the outset. Unless they're being lazy and want to have their 6 month refresh built in by just upping the clocks without any effort required.
Click to expand...

They might have underclocked them so we can sit in awe at benchmarks like these. Gamers like getting more than they paid for and love to tinker, so leaving a lot of room for companies to build PCBs and custom cooling solutions as well as the user to feel like they're getting more than $550 worth. There's also the issue of power consumption, which AMD has strived to improve and where nvidia really doesn't seem to care, so keeping it lower clocked and still performing well looks better. Now to take that sort of thinking onto the CPU side...
 
bildad said:
Kinda curious as to why if these OC so easily they didn't clock them higher from the outset. Unless they're being lazy and want to have their 6 month refresh built in by just upping the clocks without any effort required.
Click to expand...
its pretty simple. not all of these cards will oc as high and AMD wanted to make sure they could have enough cards available.
 
cannondale06 said:
its pretty simple. not all of these cards will oc as high and AMD wanted to make sure they could have enough cards available.
Click to expand...

Every single review I've seen, which is many, has had no issue reaching 1125mhz on stock voltage. So, I don't see why 1000mhz would have been out of the question for a stock speed, nice big marketing number too :p.
 
GoldenTiger said:
Every single review I've seen, which is many, has had no issue reaching 1125mhz on stock voltage. So, I don't see why 1000mhz would have been out of the question for a stock speed, nice big marketing number too :p.
Click to expand...
there were two reviews I saw on December that could not hit 1100 though.
 
pelo said:
They might have underclocked them so we can sit in awe at benchmarks like these. Gamers like getting more than they paid for and love to tinker, so leaving a lot of room for companies to build PCBs and custom cooling solutions as well as the user to feel like they're getting more than $550 worth. There's also the issue of power consumption, which AMD has strived to improve and where nvidia really doesn't seem to care, so keeping it lower clocked and still performing well looks better. Now to take that sort of thinking onto the CPU side...
Click to expand...

True, we all like to get more than we paid for. Just seems if there's a lot of excess headroom then use it and increase your lead over the competition even more thus making your product even more attractive. It didn't help when the stock clocks came out and a lot of people said "meh." I'm not sure power would be an issue though as on the stock voltage OC the increased power draw was pretty negligable. Very impressive.
 
cannondale06 said:
its pretty simple. not all of these cards will oc as high and AMD wanted to make sure they could have enough cards available.
Click to expand...

It'll be interesting to see more results when they start getting into customer hands in larger numbers. Hopefully this one isn't just a freakishly good card.
 
The Mac said:
i believe that was before the TIM issue was discovered....
Click to expand...
that probably had nothing to do with it. I believe even with tim issue people still got 1125 out of the card if it was capable. the tim issues only meant that it was running a couple degrees warmer thus making the fan run a little louder. some cards just cant hit 1100 at stock voltage.

anyway here is one of the reviews that could not do 1100. http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7970/31.html

Maximum stable clocks of our card are 1075 MHz core (16% overclock)
 
cannondale06 said:
that probably had nothing to do with it. I believe even with tim issue people still got 1125 out of the card if it was capable. the tim issues only meant that it was running a couple degrees warmer thus making the fan run a little louder. some cards just cant hit 1100 at stock voltage.

anyway here is one of the reviews that could not do 1100. http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7970/31.html

Maximum stable clocks of our card are 1075 MHz core (16% overclock)
Click to expand...

I could live with that...
 
Hard to take some other sites seriously
Pc perspective couldn't even turn vsync off in skyrim.
 
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