

The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition is only slightly warmer and a skosh louder than its predecessor at idle. But we’re not concerned about idle. The last time we looked at Radeon HD 7970, we were most worried about its bad behavior under a load.


Although we’re not worried about an 84 degree load temperature, it is nine degrees higher than the retail Radeon HD 7970 we have in the lab (and the hottest-running single-GPU card we have).
Much more troubling is the noise generated by AMD’s problematic reference cooler. I even had to go back and re-test because it seemed inconceivable that the company would ship out cards that were even louder than the Radeon HD 6990.
There’s a silver lining on this one, though. Ahead of this review, I let AMD know about our acoustic concerns and the company claims that most partner boards will employ third-party cooling, not its reference configuration. Just a little earlier this week we saw in Radeon HD 7950 3 GB: Six Cards, Benchmarked And Reviewed that new heat sinks and fans can work wonders on Tahiti-based boards. Fingers crossed, then, that the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Editions that show up on store shelves don’t sound like our sample.
Of course, you don't have to wait for board partners to work their magic...
- Is An Overclocked Radeon HD 7970 Greater Than GeForce GTX 680?
- PowerTune With Boost: Is The Accelerator Stuck?
- Radeon HD 7970 Vs. Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition
- Overclocking With PowerTune
- Will Your Old 7970 Take A GHz Edition Firmware?
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark 11
- Benchmark Results: Battlefield 3 (DX 11)
- Benchmark Results: Crysis 2 (DX 9/11)
- Benchmark Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (DX 9)
- Benchmark Results: DiRT 3 (DX 11)
- Benchmark Results: World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm (DX 11)
- Benchmark Results: Metro 2033 (DX 11)
- Benchmark Results: GPU Compute
- Benchmark Results: MediaConverter 7.5
- Temperature And Noise
- Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Gets Our Aftermarket Cooling Treatment
- Power Consumption
- New Drivers Deliver; Radeon HD 7970 Claims A Symbolic Win
And for the gamers: take a look at the new UT4 engine! Without excellent GPGPU performace this will be a disaster for each graphics card. See you, Nvidia.
the issue is them rethinking their future designs scares me... Nvidia has started a HORRIBLE trend in the business that I hope to dear god AMD does not follow suite. True, Nvidia is able to produce more gaming performance for less, but this is pushing anyone who wants GPU compute to get an overpriced professional card. now before you say "well if you're making a living out of it, fork out the cash and go Quadro", let me remind you that a lot of innovators in various fields actually do use GPU compute to ultimately make progress (especially in academic sciences) to ultimately bring us better tech AND new directions in tech development... and I for one know a lot of government funded labs that can't afford to buy a stack of quadro cards
now if only you could bold it
with Winzip that does not use GPU, VCE that slows down video encoding and a card that gives lower min FPS..... EPIC FAIL.
or before releasing your products, try to ensure S/W compatibility.
the issue is them rethinking their future designs scares me... Nvidia has started a HORRIBLE trend in the business that I hope to dear god AMD does not follow suite. True, Nvidia is able to produce more gaming performance for less, but this is pushing anyone who wants GPU compute to get an overpriced professional card. now before you say "well if you're making a living out of it, fork out the cash and go Quadro", let me remind you that a lot of innovators in various fields actually do use GPU compute to ultimately make progress (especially in academic sciences) to ultimately bring us better tech AND new directions in tech development... and I for one know a lot of government funded labs that can't afford to buy a stack of quadro cards
And for the gamers: take a look at the new UT4 engine! Without excellent GPGPU performace this will be a disaster for each graphics card. See you, Nvidia.
;-)
Excellent tip. Told you I'd look into it!
WoW is meaningful, actually.
New games will make it in when vendors start giving us more than two or three days to retest all of their graphics cards
And here's me, hoping that this kind of competition landscape would still be present in the enthusiast CPU market.
I really hope this is trolling, rather than a calous endeavor to discredit a competitors product.