Sapphire toxic 7970 6gb vs msi gtx 680 4gb

acdcrockme

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Hello, I'm looking for a card to put in my comp I'm building so far I have a antec twelve hundred and a Asus p8z77-v deluxe and I'm looking at getting a thermaltake toughpower 1200w psu intel i7 ultimate edition and 32gb of corsair vengence ddr3
 

jacknhut

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They are both about the same in performance. Get whatever cheaper. The only reason HD 7970 Toxic and the HD 7970 Ghz edition is able to overcome the reference GTX 680 is because they are voltage unlocked and people manually increase voltage to get more Mhz. However, the MSI GTX 680 Lightning is able to even the field and is pretty much as fast if not faster than the HD 7970 Toxic or Ghz edition because it is also voltage unlocked.

HD 7970 at 1200+ Mhz (which requires manual increase in voltage) is about equal in performance to GTX 680 at 1250+ Mhz (which may or may not require increase in voltage). Some rare HD 7970 can do 1300+ mhz, which is equal to GTX 680 at 1350+ mhz (which requires increase in voltage and thus MSI Lightning GTX 680 is the only one who can do that).

If you are one of those who are not comfortable changing voltage, then the max overclock you most likely can do is 1150-1200 Mhz or less on the HD 7970. For your reference, a preoverclocked GTX 680 with a locked voltage (basically the EVGA superclocked GTX 680, Gigabyte GTX 680 GC, Zotac GTX 680 AMP etc...) can get a boost clock up to 1250+ Mhz easily and they can outperform the HD 7970 at 1150-1200 Mhz.
 

budusca

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o ready got my 7970 vapor x 3gb running bf3 max settings at 5760x1080 not lagging or anything oc to 1200/1600 people told me its better to buy 2 7970 for that resolution but it looks like i wont be needing one , 3dmark vantage score p31591
gpu score 36625 , 3dmark gpu score 23331 cpu score 22071
this was with everything on extreme texture/shadow shader/shadow resolution/shader,multisample count 4, texture filtering anisotropy,maximum anisotropy 16 those where 3dmark setting the cpu is a i5 2500k oc to 4.5 , yea i'm mrwil from newegg Reviews for the 7970 vapor x gave it a 4 star :) , and yea my card came with 1.2v i just increased the clock speed to 1.2 and it was stable, but if i where to play on a single 1080/1200 etc monitor i would just get a gtx 670 :)
 

jacknhut

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MSI Lightning GTX 680 out of the box can boost to 1250-1300 mhz range without any voltage change as well. Like I said, they are pretty much the same in performance since the GTX 680 Lightning at 1250-1300 Mhz boost clock will match if not beat the HD 7970 at 1200 mhz.

A 1200 Mhz 7970 is not a regular 7970, its a very highly overclocked card and thus need to be compared against the highly overclocked card like MSI Lightning or the EVGA Classified GTX 680.

Oh and you only need a 1250+ boost GTX 680 (which most of the preoverclocked GTX 680 such as Gigabyte, Asus TOP, Zotac AMP etc can do) to trade blow with a 1200 Mhz HD 7970, 1300+ boost GTX 680 will trade blow with the 1250+ mhz HD 7970.
 

jacknhut

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Fastest single GPU out of the box available is relative because The toxic is already shipped with a high manufacturer overclock and a higher voltage than the standard HD 7970 so there is not much room left to overclock it without any further increase in voltage.

On the contrary, The MSI Lightning GTX 680 is NOT shipped with a higher voltage than the standard GTX 680 and MSI doesn't overclock it very high for the end user so there is a lot of room left to increase the clock further without even touching the voltage yet.

These cards are made for overclocking, not for those who buy it out of the box without touching anything. With that being said, I consider out of the box highest clock equals to the ability to increase the clock of the GPU without further increase in voltage and the MSI Lightning GTX 680 can achieve 1250-1300 Mhz out of the box, which easily matches the 1200 Mhz clock of the Toxic.
 

jacknhut

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The Toxic doesn't need to be overclocked out of the box because it's already being overclocked by the manufacturer and its already being overvolted by the manufacturer for the users. The MSI Lightning if its being overvolt by the manufacturer will achieve a higher out of the box clock as well, but it is not being overvolted by the manufacturer and thus there is a difference. That is why people who buy these cards tend to overclock themselves.

By saying the Toxic is fastest card "out of the box" is extremely misleading because its already being overvolted as described above while the MSI Lightning GTX 680 is not and thus it still has more room to gain.
 

acdcrockme

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I originally wanted the 690 but price is a huge factor there I've seen a play through with the gtx 680 vs a 7970 on bf3 and the gtx680 had smoother fps levels the 7970 was Very unstable
 

jacknhut

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None of your arugements explained the facts that your favorite HD 7970 is overvolted by the manufacturer by default while the MSI Lightning GTX 680 is NOT, hence the Mhz difference "out of the box". Also, you argued that the out of the box clock of your HD 7970 is higher while you failed to comprehend that none of the users who buy these kind of video card will use "stock" settings.

Now, regaridng your overclocking arguement, since you mentioned that you want to talk about how high of an overclock your HD 7970 can go, let me link you a different review that show the MSI lightning can overclock to 1374 Mhz at stock voltage, MUCH higher than a mere "10%" in a review that you personally cherry picked yourself in that link.
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/55902-msi-gtx-680-lightning-review-21.html

gtx680lightning90.jpg


Since you like the "out of the box" setting so much, here is a out of the box settings for you with regular HD 7970 and the overclocked and overvolted HD 7970 Ghz edition benchmark, which both of them lost to GTX 680 and even GTX 670 at stock. Happy now?
gtx680lightning39stock.jpg


Oh and btw, according to that review, the MSI lightning also comes with a Ln2 bios, so if users switch to this bios, the maximum boost clock can go up to 1450 Mhz and is certainly high enough to beat that Toxic 7970.

Lastly, before bringing on your accusation tongue of me being a Nvidia fanboy, perhaps you should look at yourself first because you are the infamous AMD fanboy as mentioned in this forum in various threads by many people and I'm not even in a mood to go there right now. ALso, I should remind you that I made recommendation for HD 7970 many times over GTX 680 depending on the price. In fact, I always prefer HD 7970 Ghz edition with custom cooling or for liquid cooling people over the vanilla GTX 680 so you can shut it with your blind accusation.

Just because your precious Toxic is overvolted by default doesn't make it any better than the MSI lighitning which is not overvolted by default but has the potential to overclock much higher. It's you who are desperately defending the champion title of the HD 7970 which was stripped away by Nvida GTX 680 and your feelings are hurt by the facts that your HD 7970 is no longer the king of single GPU because you found a HD 7970 card that can clock higher "out of the box" than similar class GTX 680 as defending reasons. Let me remind you again that these cards are for the overclockers who want to push it to the limit, not for those who want to play it at stock and thus your arugments for the out of the box stock settings are getting old.
 

Flare01

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Jacknhut has a point, using the "out of the box" clocks as argument for a top end overclocking card that costs almost 200-300 dollars on top of the already expensive card (HD 7970 or GTX 680) is stupid. These cards are obviously made for overclockers, not just any overclockers, extreme overclockers that wants the highest overclockability, so its the overclocking capabilities that justifies which card is faster, not the "out of the box" specs. Hell if people only use stock settings, they would already buy the vanilla 7970 or GTX 680, why bother buying a 200-300 dolllars more expensive card just to play at default???

Also, I LoL @ jacknhut being a Nvida fanboy? He recommended more HD 7970 to people than the GTX 680 in this forum. If he is a Nvidia fanboy, then I guess all people in the forum who recommend HD 7970 are also Nvida fan boys.