AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Review: Give Me Back That Crown!

Name: Will Your Old 7970 Take A GHz Edition Firmware? - AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Review: Give Me Back That Crown!
Author: Chris Angelini

by Chris Angelini June 21, 2012 at 11:00 PM

259 Comments

Will Your Old 7970 Take A GHz Edition Firmware?

Back in the day of the Radeon HD 6900-series cards, extracting more performance was as simple as taking your Radeon HD 6950 and flashing the 6970’s firmware over the top of it. Since much of what we've already seen from the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition already seems like a simple BIOS update, we wanted to see if the original 7970 would take this new card's firmware. Because the cards use different subsystem IDs (SSIDs), our first attempt involved forcing the update tool to overwrite the original BIOS.

Our system booted into Windows without incident after this little bit of cosmetic surgery. However, the driver wouldn't recognize a supported card, as witnessed in the following GPU-Z screenshot:

Clearly, something's not right. Just look at the memory capacity. Then there's the GPU clock rate and missing support for OpenCL/DirectCompute. In the end, we’re forced to concede that upgrading an old board to the new BIOS just isn't as easy as it was in the past.

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About the author

Chris Angelini & Igor Wallossek @chris_angelini

Chris Angelini is an Editor Emeritus at Tom's Hardware US. He edits hardware reviews and covers high-profile CPU and GPU launches.

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259 comments

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esrever

50 mhz boosts are kinda low imo
Darkerson

My only complaint with the "new" card is the price. Otherwise it looks like a nice card. Better than the original version, at any rate, not that the original was a bad card to begin with.
mayankleoboy1

Thanks for putting my name in teh review

now if only you could bold it
wasabiman321

Great I just ordered a gtx 670 ftw... Grrr I hope performance gets better for nvidia drivers too
mayankleoboy1

nice show AMD !

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.
hellfire24

not trying to be a fanboy but "Still GTX 670 gives you best BANG FOR DA BUCK!"
vmem

jrharbortTo me, increasing the memory speed was a pointless move. Nvidia realized that all of the bandwidth provided by GDDR5 and a 384bit bus is almost never utilized. The drop back to a 256bit bus on their GTX 680 allowed them to cut cost and power usage without causing a drop in performance. High end AMD cards see the most improvement from an increased core clock. Memory... Not so much.Then again, Nvidia pretty much cheated on this generation as well. Cutting out nearly 80% of the GPGPU logic, something Nvidia had been trying to market for YEARS, allowed then to even further drop production costs and power usage. AMD now has the lead in this market, but at the cost of higher power consumption and production cost.This quick fix by AMD will work for now, but they obviously need to rethink their future designs a bit.

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
andrewcarr

So happy
DataGrave

Quote:

Nvidia has started a HORRIBLE trend in the business that I hope to dear god AMD does not follow suite.

100% acknowledge

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.
cangelini

mayankleoboy1Thanks for putting my name in teh review now if only you could bold it

;-)
Excellent tip. Told you I'd look into it!
scrumworks

When do you actually start using new games for benchmark? Let me give you a hint, WoW is not a new game and neither it's performance is any meaningful, because it's badly coded and looking a game and graphics are lousy Quake 2 level. See it yourself what kind of game they are testing here: http://tinyurl.com/dxarebj
esrever

could you do power consumption with a game instead of 3dmark? it seems these cards uses much less power durring gaming and 3dmark doesn't give a realistic showing. Maybe have both graphs would be nice so you know the maximal as well as the general gaming power use.
DataGrave

Quote:

Maybe have both graphs would be nice so you know the maximal as well as the general gaming power use.

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EzioAs

AMD's Driver team really deserve praise this time. Kudos AMD!
cangelini

scrumworksWhen do you actually start using new games for benchmark? Let me give you a hint, WoW is not a new game and neither it's performance is any meaningful, because it's badly coded and looking a game and graphics are lousy Quake 2 level. See it yourself what kind of game they are testing here: http://tinyurl.com/dxarebj

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
vrumor

recon you are about as big of a fanboy of nvidia as people who are disliking your comment are of AMD. So before ya spout off about fanboi'ism, look in the mirror bud. I have a 7970 and until I read this I would tell people all day to get a 670. So I guess it holds true, truth hurts huh?
sarinaide

Very nice work, basically upping the way lower than Nvidia clocks to restore parity in performance. Obviously the buffed up speeds will increase the load power but the idle power and low state draws still are industry leading. A very good update.
masterjaw

Either way, this will be good for the competition and for us consumers.

And here's me, hoping that this kind of competition landscape would still be present in the enthusiast CPU market.
xtreme5

what????????? AMD over the GTX 680 no no, it's not possible noooooooooooooooooooooooo....
sarinaide

recon-ukMeh at best.

I really hope this is trolling, rather than a calous endeavor to discredit a competitors product.
EzioAs

Btw Chris, does the new driver show significant performance increase in crossfire over previous one? Could you look up on that please?
ta152h

I don't know why AMD's driver team deserves praise. Their poor coding ability made the 7970 under-perform for six months. Obviously they were not as ready for the hardware as NVIDIA's folks were, and missed by a lot. That's not a good thing. Finally getting it right is good, but let's not forget the other part of it.
stanistheman

Hey nvidia fan boys? you feel like crying? you should cause your So called "Fastest gpu" the gtx 680 is no more ITS THE 7970 GHZ. even the 7950 beat the 680 is skyrim Go cry nvidia fan boys. its time for the 7970 to shows its better. 3gb vram? 384bit? less heat then 680? yes please. here i come 7970.
stanistheman

nice work amd