We start off by testing both cards at 1050 and 925 MHz. Since our samples are completely stable at those frequencies, we didn’t have to touch the PowerTune slider at all. The new card didn’t throttle, either, yielding an ideal comparison. As before, we logged power consumption for 50 seconds, using a gaming workload this time.

The dotted lines represent one card running at the emulated clock speeds of the other. And the final analysis yields an interesting result: the older and supposedly less-refined card draws marginally less power at 1050 MHz. It does even better at 925 MHz, coming in almost 5 W under the GHz Edition board. Perhaps this is a result of AMD’s voltage-adding mechanism designed to keep Tahiti more stable at its boost frequency.

However, we’re still not applying a full load to either card. Our next test does just that by applying a compute workload that doesn’t trigger throttling.

Power draw is pretty similar between the two boards. The new card might do its job under the TDP ceiling defined for the original 7970, but AMD’s GHz Edition board definitely doesn’t offer more performance at the same power levels as its predecessor. If you want more speed, you have to use more power.
- 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.