W/C 7970 OC vs 680

[sam_fisher]

I'm thinking of selling my current HD 7870 to my brother and upgrading. Would I be better off with a HD 7970, overclock it a lot, and begin water cooling it OR should I get a GTX 680 and overclock what I can out of it on air.

To buy all the parts to watercool the 7970 and to buy the 7970 costs as much for me as a single 680, so I'm not sure.

 

[rolli59]

It is going to be your decision in the end. Why not go with the GTX680.

 

[sam_fisher]

I should've re worded my question a bit better - what would get me better performance at 1920x1080?

 

[rolli59]

The GTX680 http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_680/27.html
regardless of cooling the cards will run into none temp related stability issues. You start with a faster card, most likely it will stay ahead.

 

[rexdale_punjabi]

Lol, you are a flippin fanboy good sir, and a bad one at that. http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2012-vga-gpgpu/19-Tom-s-Hardware-Index-B-Performance,2976.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2012-vga-gpgpu/19-Tom-s-Hardware-Index-C-Extreme,2977.html

Here charts for your leisure right from here.

A 7970 at 1080 performs slightly better than a 680 at 1111. And, on top of that you'll def. be ocing a 7970 under water much harder than any 680 on air.

I know question is old but I just stumbled upon it. You'll easily be losing 20-25%+ perf. due to lose oc, etc.

I havn't had any driver issues as they say, and it's been smooth sailing.

 

[sarinaide]

GCN architecture is far superior when overclocking is concerned.

 

[sarinaide]

Don't really need to OC the Ghz Editions, they are already faster than the 680 at least on DX11 rendering, perhaps just slightly slower in tessellation but AMD waited for Nvidia to release and show their hand and now are unleashing the untapped performance left on the GCN architecture, to which the already maxed out Keplers cannot match.

A friend that is part of team MSI did a lightning showdown, they got the 7970 to 1550mhz on relatively low voltage tweaks, at little under 1400mhz the 680 practically melted its SOI. Give it a couple months and AMD will start to show off the untapped potential left in the GCN chips, by far the most radical GPU microarchitecture.

Up until GCN I was the biggest team Green fan, due to bad experiences with ATI but now after getting test samples of Kepler early it all changed.