AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Review

The AMD HD7970 GHZ Edition is an extremely powerful graphics card capable of handling the highest resolutions and most demanding image quality settings. The benchmark results today show that it often has a slight edge over the reference clocked Nvidia GTX680.

That said, as an ‘exciting new update' to the original HD7970 I can't help but feel disappointed on a variety of levels.

Firstly, AMD are still using the same cooling system concept, comprising a tiny red fan and modest non heatpipe cooler. To maintain the thermal curve this fan has to spin fast, subsequently emitting a lot of noise.

Make no mistake this reference HD7970 GHZ Edition is much louder than a reference cooled GTX680. I can understand that AMD will rely on their partners to improve the cooler, but surely by now they can place a little effort into the design and construction of a decent, lower noise reference cooler. Nvidia certainly have.

When this card is compared against a high end overclocked GTX680 such as the KFA2 GTX680 LTD OC Edition, the performance falls short. We are hoping that Sapphire may release a version of this card, clocked even higher. I would love to get my hands on a HD7970 GHZ Edition with heatpipe Vapor X cooler clocked at 1,100mhz, or possibly even 1,150mhz.

If our reference sample is anything to go by, there is plenty of headroom available on the core so I don't see a reason why this wouldn't be possible. With a dual fan cooler, the noise levels could be reduced significantly and a strong thermal curve maintained.

We were surprised initially that the GTX680 beat the HD7970 GHZ Edition in the handful of games we tested across three screens at 5,760×1080 on the secondary 3960X Extreme Edition system. We reinstalled from fresh and reran the tests and performance increased. We aren't sure what caused the initial performance hit, but we can only assume that throttling was occurring on some level. We also noticed that 3DMark Vantage once dropped to a score below 20,000 points, from the published 34,210 score highlighted in this review.

The breaking point for me is the noise levels generated by the reference HD7970 GHZ Edition. I had to check the GTX680 fan was actually working after running a variety of tests on the AMD hardware beforehand. The noise differences are simply vast.

AMD are promoting the GPGPU capabilities of the hardware, however we tend to focus on gaming prowess, as that is what the majority of our audience are interested in reading about.

Right now we have no UK pricing for the HD7970 GHZ, but we can expect a minor price increase when compared to the standard HD7970, which is currently retailing for around the £360-£399 inc vat mark. If AMD don't maintain a sub £400 price point then it will be rather difficult to recommend.

What card would we buy today for under £400? The Asus GTX670 with DirectCU II cooler, which retails for £349.99 inc vat. We know these cards respond well to extreme overclocking, and are very quiet under load.

In closing, there is no doubt the HD7970 GHZ Edition is a very impressive card, but until AMD partners can fix the cooling solution Nvidia have the edge. Their reference GTX680 is very closely matched and the cooler generates much less noise.

Pros:

• Noticeable improvement over the original HD7970.
• Good overclocking headroom.
• Quiet when non tasked.
• Dual bios switch is handy.
• 3GB of GDDR5 memory.
• Low idle power draw.

Cons:

• Loud when loaded.
• Price looks to be higher.
• Added power drain over initial HD7970.
• Overclocked GTX680 models are faster (and quieter).

Kitguru says: Another fast card from AMD, but we are slightly disappointed they didn't develop a new, improved cooling solution. Will they always rely on their partners to fix this?

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