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AMD have had great success with their latest 7 series of discrete graphics cards. The HD7970 led the performance charts for some time until Nvidia released their flagship single GPU, the GTX680. AMD are attempting to answer the challenge with the HD7970 ‘GHZ' Edition, earning the moniker from the enhanced default 1ghz+ core clock speed.
The GTX680 is without question one of Nvidia's finest moments, replacing the excellent GTX580 which was in my own personal gaming system for close to a year. We have already reviewed a handful of GTX680's, including some fantastic overclocked, modified custom cards from the likes of ASUS and KFA2.
Today we will see how the HD7970 GHZ Edition slots into the market, running tests inside our mainstream system against a plethora of other cards. Later in the review we will test against the reference GTX680 and an overclocked KFA2 GTX680 across three screens inside our ultra high end Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition system.
The new HD7970 GHZ Edition is shipped with a boost frequency set to 1050mhz. PowerTune with boost uses a new algorithm which measures the temperature and power draw levels so it can effectively adjust the core clock speed. According to AMD the latest system also tunes the voltage so it can maintain stability at enhanced speeds.
| Product | AMD HD7970 AMD HD7970 GHZ Ed |
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 (1,500mhz) |
1,250mhz | 1,200mhz | 1,200mhz |
| Memory Data Rate | 5.5 GBps (6Gbps) |
5.0 Gbps | 4.8 Gbps | 4.8 Gbps |
| Memory Bandwidth | 264 GB/s (288GB/s) | 240 GB/s | 153.6 GB/s | 153.6 GB/s |
We can see when compared to the reference HD7970, that the new GHZ model has received a 125mhz core clock increase. Memory has been increased in speed from 1,375mhz to 1,500mhz, giving a theoretical bandwidth limitation of 288GB/s.
