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We reviewed the reference AMD HD7970 flagship card in December last year and we were suitably impressed. A few weeks later XFX sent us their XFX R7970 Double Dissipation graphics card which featured a custom cooling solution. Today we look at the latest version of the card from partner VTX3D – The ‘HD7970 X Edition' is the first HD7970 we have reviewed which features not only a modified cooler, but overclocked core clock and memory speeds. Is this good enough to get the Kitguru seal of approval?
It would be fair to say that VTX3D are a little known player in the graphics sector, although they are trying hard to raise their profile with the enthusiast gamer. They are a division of Tul Corporation, who also manage the more widely known PowerColor series of hardware.
VTX3D are a subsection of Tul Corporation who focus on achieving the lowest possible price points. For instance, their last generation dual GPU HD6990 was priced at £515 inc vat on Amazon, when others were £599 inc vat.
VTX3D know they have a lot to prove in the enthusiast sector, so are they any good when it comes to batting head to head against the big boys, such as Sapphire and XFX ?
The X Edition card we are reviewing today certainly ticks all the right boxes on paper. It ships with a custom cooler, dual fans and significant out of the box clock speeds.
| Product | VTX3D X Edition AMD HD7970 |
AMD HD7950 | AMD HD7870 | AMD HD7850 |
| Core Clock speed | 925mhz (1050mhz) | 800mhz | 1000mhz | 860mhz |
| Transistors | 4.31 billion | 4.31 billion | 2.8 billion | 2.8 billion |
| Stream Processors | 2,048 | 1,792 | 1,280 | 1,024 |
| Compute Performance | 3.79 TFLOPS | 2.87 TFLOPS | 2.56 TFLOPS | 1.76 TFLOPS |
| Texture Units | 128 | 112 | 80 | 64 |
| Texture Fillrate | 118.4 GT/s | 89.6 GT/s | 80 GT/s | 55.0 GT/s |
| ROPs | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 |
| Pixel Fillrate | 29.6 GP/s | 25.6 GP/s | 32.0 GP/s | 27.52 GP/s |
| Z/Stencil | 128 | 128 | 128 | 128 |
| Memory Type | 3GB GDDR5 | 3GB GDDR5 | 2GB GDDR5 | 2GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Clock | 1,375mhz (1,425mhz) | 1,250mhz | 1,200mhz | 1,200mhz |
| Memory Data Rate | 5.5 GBps (5.7Gbps) | 5.0 Gbps | 4.8 Gbps | 4.8 Gbps |
| Memory Bandwidth | 264 GB/s | 240 GB/s | 153.6 GB/s | 153.6 GB/s |
Above, we can see how the VTX3D Radeon HD7970 X Edition slots into the marketplace (clock speeds marked in bold). The core clock speed is increased from 925mhz to a whopping 1,050mhz out of the box, and the 3GB of GDDR5 memory receives a tweak from 1,375 mhz (5.5 Gbps) to 1,425 mhz (5.7Gbps).
