Asus HD7970 Tri Crossfire Review

1. Introduction2. Asus HD79703. Asus HD7970 (Super High Res Gallery)4. Testing Methodology5. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark6. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage7. Synthetic: 3DMark 118. Synthetic: HQV Benchmark 2.09. Gaming: F1 201110. Gaming Lost Planet 211. Gaming: Alien V Predator12. Gaming: Far Cry 213. Technical: Acoustics Performance14. Technical: Thermal Dynamics15. Technical: Power Consumption16. Closing Thoughts17. View All Pages

AMD released their HD7970 on December 22nd last year and we followed up with four separate reviews focusing on single card, dual card configurations and modified cards from XFX. Today we are looking at several ASUS cards, and to make it more interesting, we have opted to build a three way Crossfire system. Just what kind of performance can you expect from three of these killer cards in a high end system?

AMD's HD7970 is a monster card, easily claiming the top single GPU performance spot from the long standing, yet still very capable Nvidia GTX580. When it comes to high resolution gaming with the eye candy cranked to the limits, there is nothing right now to touch the HD7970. We have already looked at the performance from two of these cards in Crossfire, but what can you expect if you decided to spend a small fortune for three of them?

Asus sent us two of the HD7970's and we used an additional reference AMD card for the three way testing today.

This HD7970 arrives in a box with the same ‘Lord Of The Rings' style artwork we have seen before with other Asus graphics cards. An angry looking dude with giant sword takes centerstage on the front of the box. Not the greatest box artwork.

Inside, the product is protected under cardboard with thick foam side panels. Asus bundle several video and power converters, a Crossfire cable and literature on the product with a software/driver disc. As always we recommend you get the drivers direct from the AMD website as the files on the disc could be several revisions out of date.

The Asus HD7970 is based solely on the AMD reference design with ASUS branding on the cooler . The reference HD7970 has received a cooling upgrade, which is long overdue. The fan is wider, with a new blade design which is said to deliver lower noise emissions with enhanced cooling efficiency. Thanks to the wider blades, airflow has also been improved.

The Asus card is Crossfire capable in 2, 3 and 4 way configurations.

The HD7970 requires power from a 6 pin and an 8 pin connector.

The card is a dual slot design with a full sized DVI and HDMI port, and two mini Display Port connectors. It is Eyefinity capable and can power up to 6 displays. The HD7970 is the first GPU that can simultaneously output multiple, independent audio streams from the HDMI and mini Displayport connectors at the rear of the card. This is also the first GPU to support 3GHz HDMI with frame packing support for Stereo 3D.

The Tahiti core is protected under a partial cover. The memory onboard is high specification Hynix GDDR5. AMD are using a Chil controller, which is a dual loop 6+2 multiphase PWM design. This offers dynamic voltage control and features input voltage management, allowing up to three input voltages to be monitored to ensure adequate power is delivered to suit the load.

The HD7970 is built from 4.3 billion 28nm transistors.

This card features a dual BIOS toggle switch. Setting 1 is the unprotected mode allowing the end user to create their own bios configuration. Setting 2 is the factory default.

Holy power draw Batman. The system set up in a 3 way CrossfireX configuration. The HD7970 Tahiti core operates at 925mhz, and the 3GB of GDDR 5 memory runs at 1375mhz (5.5Gbps effective) which is connected via a 384 bit interface for over 264GB/sec of bandwidth. The card features 2,048 stream processors, is fully PCI E Gen3 compliant (up to 32 gb/s of data bandwidth) and incorporates new AMD Powertune and ZeroCore power technology. There are dual geometry engines, eight render back ends, 32 color ROPs per clock and 128 Z/stencil ROPs per clock.

On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later.

To test today we are using our long standing Core i7 970 system, which is overclocked. We have a variety of hardware benchmarked on this system within the last couple of weeks which will make for an interesting market comparison.

Test System:
Processor: Core i7 970 @ 4.6ghz
Graphics: ASUS HD7970 x2 & AMD HD7970 (x3 way Crossfire)
Cooling: Coolit Vantage
Motherboard: MSI X58A-GD65
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Power Supply: Corsair AX1200
Memory: 6GB ADATA @ 2133mhz 9-10-9-32
Storage: Kingston SSDNow V+ 512GB Gen 2 SSD (Storage) / Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (OS boot)

Comparison Cards:
HD6990 (880 core)
HD6970
HD6950
HD6870
HD6790
HD6770
HD6670
GTX590 SLi
GTX590
GTX580 SLi
GTX580
GTX570

Monitors: Dell U2410 x 3 / LaCie 730

Software:
Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark

Games:
Lost Planet 2
F1 2011
Alien V Predator
Far Cry 2

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page.

Some game descriptions are edited from Wikipedia.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We use the following settings: 1920×1080 resolution. Anti Aliasing off. Anisotrophy 4, Tessellation normal. Shaders High. Stereo 3D disabled. API: Direct X 11.

The three HD7970's knock the Quad SLI GTX590 configuration from the top spot, scoring a staggering average of almost 185 fps at these settings!

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

The Nvidia GTX590 Quad SLi configuration scores 55,432 points in this test, but it is relegated to second place, with the tri crossfire HD7970 system scoring 57,170 points at the same settings.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

The Nvidia GTX590 Quad Sli configuration slightly outperforms AMD's HD7970 in three way Crossfire with this synthetic Direct X 11 test. This reverses the situation from the previous Direct X 10 3DMark Vantage test.

HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evalute motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection.

There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on Bluray. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content so will we.

This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis.

Read our initial analysis over here

	Asus HD7970
Dial	4
Dial with static pattern	5
Gray Bars	5
Violin	5
Stadium 2:2	5
Stadium 3:2	5
Horizontal Text Scroll	5
Vertical Text Scroll	5
Transition to 3:2 Lock	5
Transition to 2:2 Lock	0
2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video	5
2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video	5
3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed	5
5:5 FPS Animation	5
6:4 12 FPS Animation	5
8:7 8 FPS Animation	5
Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP)	5
Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE)	5
Random Noise: Sailboat	5
Random Noise: Flower	5
Random Noise: Sunrise	5
Random Noise: Harbour Night	5
Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Luminance Frequency Bands	5
Chrominance Frequency Bands	5
Vanishing Text	5
Resolution Enhancement	15
Theme Park	5
Driftwood	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Skin Tones	7
Total	196

A score of 196 points is class leading right now, the ideal solution for high definition media playback.

F1 2011 is the newest Direct X 11 racing game from industry pioneers CodeMasters. The 2011 Formula One season is the 62nd FIA Formula One season. The original calendar consisted of twenty rounds, including the inaugural running of the Indian Grand Prix before the cancellation of the Bahrain Grand Prix. Pirelli returns to the sport as tyre supplier for all teams, taking over from Bridgestone. Red Bull Racing are the reigning Constructor’s Champions. Red Bull Racing’s Sebastian Vettel is the defending Drivers’ Champion, one of five World Champions appearing on the grid.

No performance problems at any of these settings, even across three screens with Anti Aliasing enabled.

Lost Planet 2 is a third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the sequel to Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, taking place ten years after the events of the first game, on the same fictional planet. We don’t really enjoy playing this game, but the engine is a great Direct X 11 test of modern hardware.

Tri Crossfire scaling in Lost Planet 2 is not great, adding only a little to the scores. It is enough however to push performance past the Quad SLI GTX590 system .

Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today.

To test the cards we used a 1080p resolution with DX11, Texture Quality Very High, MSAA Samples 1, 16 af, ambient occulsion on, shadow complexity high, motion blur on. We use this with most of our graphics card testing so cards are comparable throughout reviews.

A very intensive Direct X 11 engine which receives decent gains from two and three cards, especially across higher resolutions and image quality settings. It is very close fought with an Nvidia Quad SLI GTX590 configuration however.

Far Cry 2 (commonly abbreviated as “FC2 or “fc2″) is an open-ended first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America and on October 23, 2008 in Europe and Australia. It was made available on Steam on October 22, 2008. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2.

Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, though the sequel has very few noticeable similarities to the original game. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay that allows the player greater freedom to explore different African landscapes such as deserts, jungles, and savannas. The game takes place in a modern-day East African nation in a state of anarchy and civil war. The player takes control of a mercenary on a lengthy journey to locate and assassinate “The Jackal,” a notorious arms dealer.

Far Cry 2 is still a popular game and the open world environment can be taxing on even the latest hardware available today.

Settings: 1920×1200, D3D10, Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(8x), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Ultra High), Vegetation(Very High), Shading(Ultra High), Terrain(Ultra High), Geometry(Ultra High), Post FX(High), Texture(Ultra High), Shadow(Ultra High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High).

Another demanding game at high settings, and the HD7970 puts in a good showing, averaging almost 100 fps at our single screen resolution. This rises to 190fps in Crossfire and 233fps in Tri crossfire, becoming slightly CPU limited. The results at 5760×1080 are impressive, averaging almost 90fps with three cards in Crossfire.

We have changed our method of measuring noise levels. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. We are using a heatpipe based passive power supply and an Intel SSD to keep noise levels to a minimum. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests. Ambient noise in the room is around 20-25dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

Having three of these cards in such close proximity means you will need a case with a high level of airflow, and preferably a large side case fan directly beside the motherboard. Under load, the three cards generate a high level of noise, making it rather unpleasant unless you wear headphones.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 25c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.

Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic.

With three cards in the system, the temperatures rise by 3-5 c under load as the fans on each card spin higher to try and combat the rising ambient temperatures. The reference cooler struggles to remove the heat produced by three cards in Crossfire.

To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. We measure results while gaming in Crysis Warhead and record the results.

In such an energy aware climate, AMD are making a big deal out of their new ‘ZeroCore Power’ technology. Many solutions today use power gating, clock gating and memory compression to reduce idle power requirements, but ZeroCore power technology can completely power down the core GPU while the rest of the system remains active.

Each card demands approximately the same as other HD7970's we have tested, which isn't a surprise as these are reference based cards.

We attached the system to a power meter, to get a reading of the power drain under load when running 3DMark 11. These results are actually very impressive, considering we have three HD7970's running inside a liquid overclocked Core i7 system.

The Asus HD7970 graphics card adheres to the AMD reference design which was certainly impressive in December last year. Shortly afterwards XFX released their HD7970 Double Dissipation version of the card which featured a custom PCB design and proprietary two fan cooling solution. This pushed the technology boundaries further, even within the space of a few short weeks. The XFX card is such a huge improvement on the reference solution, that returning to the AMD design is more than a little underwhelming today.

There is no doubt that AMD's HD7970 is the new yardstick to measure single GPU performance, however we had hoped that ASUS might release a card with a custom cooling solution. Sadly, it seems this version is still some time away from retail release.

The Asus HD7970 uses the latest AMD reference cooler, which is an improvement over the previous revision, however it is significantly outperformed by the two fan cooler on the XFX card. The low level of noise is unfortunately compounded when adding two more cards to the mix. Dual HD7970 Crossfire can be slightly distracting, but in 3 way, the noise levels are intrusive. I have a feeling that three of the XFX cards in Crossfire would make for a more compelling scenario.

AMD have nailed Tessellation performance with the latest cards, and three of these are more than a match for two GTX 590's. If you can manage to find a GTX590 for sale, they cost around £650, so you would need £1,300 for a Quad SLi configuration. These Asus HD7970's retail for £499.99 each, so  three of them would set you back £1,500 …. or £200 more. They are faster than the dual GTX590's, but they also generate significantly more noise, and I honestly wouldn't be willing to live with it.

Not every game reaps noticeable rewards when upgrading from two HD7970's to three HD7970's. There is clearly still some work ahead for AMD on the 3 way CFx driver front, as some game engines don't record benefits from adding a third card.

The Asus HD7970 is without question a fantastic graphics card, but we would wait for ASUS to update their range shortly with a proprietary cooling solution. The custom cards might cost a little extra, but it seems pointless to buy one now with the inferior reference cooler.

Pros:

• HD7970 is the fastest single GPU on the market.
• Crossfire performance is staggeringly good.

Cons:

• Reference cooler.
• Can get noisy in 2 and 3 way configurations.

Kitguru says: A great card, but a more inspired release from Asus is surely just around the corner.

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