ASUS Radeon HD 7970 Video Card Review @ [H]

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

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ASUS Radeon HD 7970 Video Card Review - ASUS has released its baseline model of the recently released Radeon HD 7970. We will be compare the performance of the ASUS Radeon HD 7970 out-of-box against the highest overclock achieved with voltage tweaking, along with a Radeon HD 6970, and reference clock GeForce GTX 580.
 
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OC seems 1100 or up is very common.
1200-1250mhz or so not so much especially on air.
But seeing 1300-1350mhz on water is a pretty decent OC to those that got that far.
 
I read part of the article on power / heat

I'm a bit confused, in the initial test of the 7970 the system load with the card under load was about 370W, now it's 100W higher, is it the ASUS running higher volts from the get-go?

ahh I see, total system wattage BEFORE videocard went up 100W.

Thanks :)
 
Thanks for the review!

fixed, thanks - Brent
 
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Grady,
Please check your email. I sent you a very important email about the VID settings, because it's possible that Asus Tweak does not identify the lower Vids properly (Sapphire Trixx has the exact same problem).


Here is what I wrote to you.

Hello Grady,
Can you please check the default VID of your video card by using MSI afterburner, beta version 11, and you will need to edit the cfg file to enable 'unofficial overclocking" (change the 0 to a 1) and then click unlock voltage monitoring.

This is because I believe Asus Tweak and Sapphire Trixx both assume the default voltages for all the cards are 1.175v (1.168v is basically exactly the same).

The problem is, we found out that there are multiple Vids for the cards--4 of them in fact, and ONLY the latest GPU-Z and afterburner beta 11 can read the vids properly. They are 1.175v, 1.112v, 1.050v and 1.020v.

Also, all of the cards are currently overvoltage locked at +125 mv, meaning you can't apply more than 0.125v higher than Vid, otherwise the card willi artifact even at stock speeds.

It's very possible your card has a lower default Vid than normal. Many people who found their cards locked at 1080 mhz in CCC without artifacts, found that their VIDS were either 1.112v or 1.050v. And this is difficult to circumvent with using Trixx or Asus Tweak, as I don't think Asus Tweak has all four voltages identified, although I COULD be very wrong. It's worth a shot.

It's possible something is up with this or this may be related to your very low RAM speeds as well, as my reference card goes up to 1750 mhz with slowly increasing speeds in 3dmark '11 and Vantage (but the boost slows down a lot starting at 1675 mhz). No artifacts at all.

Worth a shot to look....
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Raap said:
Thanks for the review!

P.S. It seems you did the percentages( or the wording, depending on how you see it) the wrong way around in some of the game pages. E.g. on the Deus Ex page

The Geforce has 46.9 fps and the 7970 OC has 82.5, making the 7970 82.5/46.9=1.76 or 76% faster, and an 18% performance increase over stock. Same in the BF3 where the 7970 performance was 52% faster than the 580 and not 34.4%( the 580 was 34.4% slower, though). Etc.
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Yes, was thinking the same myself, the wording is wrong. Where it say the HD7970 is faster than, it should say that the GTX580 is so and so % slower than HD7970 for the numbers to make sence.
 
Getting 1250/1750 from my Sapphire 7970 on air with 1.3v on core and now I have a waterblock I have reached 1275/1750. If I push any more hardlock. I consider myself extremely lucky to have a core that hits 1275mhz! No visual artifacts and amazing performance close to a pair of stock 6950's in CF.... Temps are around 59C full load..
 
i hope we see the next nvidia card soon so i can decide which to get. this card looks amazing and by the time kepler is out, we may already have custom pcb and heatsinks of the 7970. yay.
 
temujin987 said:
i hope we see the next nvidia card soon so i can decide which to get. this card looks amazing and by the time kepler is out, we may already have custom pcb and heatsinks of the 7970. yay.
Click to expand...

Got my 7970, and will sell it to get a 680 or whatever when it comes out. I'm sure it will be better. I'll probably lose maybe 50 bucks on the sale.
 
Falkentyne said:
Also, all of the cards are currently overvoltage locked at +125 mv, meaning you can't apply more than 0.125v higher than Vid, otherwise the card willi artifact even at stock speeds.
Click to expand...

Realllly interesting. I have 4 Asus 7970 in Quad-Fire, and 3 are of the same VID 1.125v, and 1 has a lower 1.05 VID.

So no matter what I do, I'm ''stuck'' at 1.225v in Afterburner. I mean 1.25v and 1.3v are not artifacting, but they are not making any difference! I can't clock my cards higher with higher voltage. I get the same max OC with 1.225, 1.25v and 1.3v! :eek:

I was wandering what was happening, since the 4 cards are on water. And why I could't push the card faster with higher voltage. Now it make sense.

So how can I ''bypass'' that +0.125v limit? In Afterburner, I can choose the VID type, so should I use a different one for all cards, or the same one, or a higher one? Will it make a difference?
 
Looks Iike I'll be ordering one of these this week. Wife might kill me but my 30inch 2560x1600 dell will finnaly be happy with one card for a while at least. :D
 
I have the feeling that if the 7970 had arrived on time and fully in stock with plenty of supply the prices on the 580 and 6970 would have dropped dramatically and NVIDIA would be feeling the pain...
 
Makeroflostsouls said:
Looks Iike I'll be ordering one of these this week. Wife might kill me but my 30inch 2560x1600 dell will finnaly be happy with one card for a while at least. :D
Click to expand...

Keep telling yourself that. Battlefield 3 drops to the mid 40s at ultra in 1920x1200 when there's lots of smoke and explosions on the screen.
 
it's a demanding game, brosephine - isn't that a good thing? you know, that it's not some dumb console port?
 
Isn't this a PCI Express 3.0 card?

Correct me if I am wrong but wouldn't bench marking this on an X79 board that actually has PCI X 3.0 capabilities be a better representation of the cards abilities.
 
Thachief said:
Isn't this a PCI Express 3.0 card?

Correct me if I am wrong but wouldn't bench marking this on an X79 board that actually has PCI X 3.0 capabilities be a better representation of the cards abilities.
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Not for gaming, no.
 
Thachief said:
Isn't this a PCI Express 3.0 card?

Correct me if I am wrong but wouldn't bench marking this on an X79 board that actually has PCI X 3.0 capabilities be a better representation of the cards abilities.
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I cant see there being any real-world difference. We aren't even saturating pcie 2.0 yet. I think the difference will be very much inline with pcie 1.0 > pcie 2.0
 
Loafdogg420 said:
I cant see there being any real-world difference. We aren't even saturating pcie 2.0 yet. I think the difference will be very much inline with pcie 1.0 > pcie 2.0
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That's why :p

Our conclusions? Only a <1% miniscule benefit thanks to tighter clock timings and PLL improvements - today's high end GPU like the HD7970 and GTX590 barely even saturate PCIe x8 lanes (4GT/s). Perhaps we might see a different story with decent solid state storage setups and CPU interconnects.

Read more: http://vr-zone.com/articles/does-pc...h-the-radeon-hd-7970/14306.html#ixzz1kVkvX3CB
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http://vr-zone.com/articles/does-pc...us-we-test-with-the-radeon-hd-7970/14306.html
 
These should point out just how important PCIe bandwidth is.

http://hardocp.com/article/2010/08/16/sli_cfx_pcie_bandwidth_perf_x16x16_vs_x16x8

http://hardocp.com/article/2010/08/23/gtx_480_sli_pcie_bandwidth_perf_x16x16_vs_x8x8/

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/08/25/gtx_480_sli_pcie_bandwidth_perf_x16x16_vs_x4x4

The PCIe bandwidth jumps we are seeing are only likely to make any differences in very large resolution multi-GPU setups, and then we think the benefits will be negligible. There just is not that much data moving across the PCIe bus.
 
Thachief said:
Thanks - so in essence manufacturers offering 3.0 capable slots is absolutely a worthless gimmick at this point and time in technology.
Click to expand...

There are more things going on across the PCIe bus than just gaming. GPGPU, and data from SSDs etc...
 
Kyle, did you see my post above? I don't think the reviewer got it; might help with the overclocking issue.
 
Thachief said:
Isn't this a PCI Express 3.0 card?

Correct me if I am wrong but wouldn't bench marking this on an X79 board that actually has PCI X 3.0 capabilities be a better representation of the cards abilities.
Click to expand...

Not even relevant right now as new cpu needed for pcie 3 functionality
 
I have the same card. It's stable with maxed ccc sliders at stock voltage. I tried Trixx briefly, but probably were too optimistic and furmark crashed the driver. I realize this is a reference card that many people have now (in forms of other brands mostly), but if you want me to test something still I'm available.
 
Thachief said:
Of course strictly speaking from a gaming perspective.

I could see the need for this in a server infrastructure/database hosted solution with a PCI-E SSD.

But for right now 3.0 really does nothing for gamers.

Just wanted to add as well this was a great review as always.
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^^ True - another site had performed some tests of GPU computing and showed that the extra bandwidth actually did come in handy, since that was the primary bottleneck when GPU computing since the data goes back and forth to the memory bus quite often.

For gaming purposes though, it's not very useful - which is why I wonder why you need an SLI / crossfire adapter in the first place?
 
As of 2/2 this card is deactivated on New Egg

Cheapest one on Amazon is $655.

I wonder what's up?
 
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