HD7970 made me do it!

A

Archangel7

n00b
Joined
Jan 7, 2010
Messages
57
After being a faithful purchaser of NV products for the last 10 years, I finally decided to give ATI another chance, and purchased a couple of the 7970 Sapphire cards. The 28nm architecture coupled with power management features and performance indicated ATI cards may be a viable solution again. My last ATI purchase was the 9700pro, which was a damn good card, but after, NV had the edge on drivers, heat and noise, and performance being too close to be the only factor..

A confession, It seems all you ATI fan boys were not full of shite, and I am very pleased you are not. Being the owner of a couple of 580's, and a 590, the 7970 has provided me with a better experience, not drastic, but better. The interface console is much more intuitive from what I remember of the old; I had no problem installing the drivers and setting up eyefinity and crosfire. Image quality and scene flow is crisper and cleaner. Still louder, but that can be cured easily. Otherwise, no problems, and quite frankly much easier to setup than NV surround, which I had to play plug, unplug, adjust, etc to get three monitors to work.
 
Good to know, this will also be my first AMD/ATI card. I've always owned NVIDIA cards, from TNT2, Geforce2, Geforce4, 7950GT, 8800GT, 9800GTX+ to a couple 570s and will be ditching them for a single 7970 just because they made a good product that seems to have a lot of potential. Lots of OC headroom (If I get a decent card), and lots of future proof vs my 1.28gb 570s which was done when BF3 came out.
 
OP - how has CFX been compared to SLI? Would you say they're about the same? Any perceivable differences in microstuttering? And how much better is image quality of your 7970's compared to your previous Nvidia cards?
 
You playing BF3 and have everything maxed with 3 screens and its fine? No microstutter or screen tearing?

What monitors are you using and screen res 60/120?
 
The experience with CFX so far is great. I have not had any stuttering or other rendering issues, but I did experience lock down last night after a couple of hours playing Arkham City in eyefinity. I decided I wanted to play more, so I went ahead and cranked up the fans to 100% manually. Thought my puter was going to take off; these fans are ridiculously loud and powerful for a single gpu. One thing NVIDIA wins hands down, is on the issue of noise and heat. My GTX590 runs quiet and is barely noticable even playing for hours, the 580s too, but these monsters are twin jet engines.
 
OP, Is the 7970 loud when set to auto fan when gaming? How quiet is it at idle?
 
Okay i have 3 7970s in Tri-Fire and im running them all at 1100/1500 Stock voltage I leave the Fans on Auto and all 3 cards when gaming do not even reach 80C, I cant even hear the damn things. I have turned the fans on upto 50% and yes even at 50% they are a little loud ( 100% on all 3 cards and you cant hear yourself think LOL ) but after many games and bernchmarking i just leave it on auto.
 
Well that's good you have seen the light. But if Nvidia comes out with a superior product that significantly better, I am dumping AMD :p I show no allegiance to any company. My relationship with them is strickly business :p
 
Archangel 7...You got skyrim ...
or anyone else ...
Just trying to find out whats the performance of skyrim with the 1.4 beta patch on a hd 7970 ...
 
Archangel7 said:
After being a faithful purchaser of NV products for the last 10 years, I finally decided to give ATI another chance, and purchased a couple of the 7970 Sapphire cards. The 28nm architecture coupled with power management features and performance indicated ATI cards may be a viable solution again. My last ATI purchase was the 9700pro, which was a damn good card, but after, NV had the edge on drivers, heat and noise, and performance being too close to be the only factor..

A confession, It seems all you ATI fan boys were not full of shite, and I am very pleased you are not. Being the owner of a couple of 580's, and a 590, the 7970 has provided me with a better experience, not drastic, but better. The interface console is much more intuitive from what I remember of the old; I had no problem installing the drivers and setting up eyefinity and crosfire. Image quality and scene flow is crisper and cleaner. Still louder, but that can be cured easily. Otherwise, no problems, and quite frankly much easier to setup than NV surround, which I had to play plug, unplug, adjust, etc to get three monitors to work.
Click to expand...

Fanboys are the people who bash another company's cards without giving any documented proof as to whatever issues they are having. NOT the ones who are happy with a company's cards and continue to buy them (despite some nagging driver problems). After going from a Voodoo2 SLI to a Voodoo5 (won at an E3 contest) which I exchanged for a Geforce DDR, then went to GF2 (and remembering how the original Abit BF6 boards would *KILL* Geforce 2 cards if run at higher than 133 FSB, which was fixed in a hardware revision), and then a Ti 4600 (which is still in my old Pentium 3/win98/dos rig), I stopped using Nvidia when they couldn't fix their buggy Windows 98 drivers (back when Win98 was still the primary OS, as 2k didn't dethrone it, it took XP to do that). There were certain games, especially some Directdraw games (like Raiden II) that, when closed, would cause DDHELP to suddenly be removed from memory, which stopped all 3D from working. And the only way to have a chance to get it back without rebooting was to run DDTEST from the SDK, which sometimes worked. And I submitted bug reports about it and it was never fixed. That was a serious problem in the GF2 days...and I remember the last driver that worked stabily without weird issues were the old 30.xx detonators. The 50.x series had far more serious bugs in win98...so I simply stopped updating drivers, then moved to ATI's 9800 Pro for my next system, a Pentium 4.

BTW, before getting a Geforce 1 card, I had an Ati card paired with my voodoo2's in Win98 (the ATI card replaced an S3 virge), and the Ati drivers *NEVER* caused DDHELP to be terminated after running games. I know people hated Ati's 3d acceleration and bugs in the game drivers back then, but at least they didn't crash the entire 3D subsystem when closing a directdraw game...

That's basically why I stuck with ATI. Maybe Nvidia's QA is a lot better than it was back then, but..
 
I hope I get the same experience as you. I just purchased 2 Sapphire 7970s based on your post :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top