AMD Releases Supercharged 7970 GHz Edition Video Card
The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition introduces a number of technical and performance enhancements to AMD's already powerful 7970 high-end video card.
AMD is celebrating the sixth-month anniversary of the release of its video card in a very special way: by introducing its new big brother, the AMD Radeon HD 7970 Gigahertz Edition.
This card is the third in the GHz Edition "subseries" of AMD 7000-series releases, following the and the . Like those cards, and as you could probably guess from the name, the card sports an engine clock of 1GHz (improving on the original 7970's speed of 925MHz).
Both the 7970 and the 7970 GHz Edition utilize 2,048 stream processors and 3GB of GDDR5 memory, share similar thermals of approximately 250 watts, and offer the same selection of display output ports (one dual-link DVI, one full-size HDMI, and two Mini DisplayPort jacks).Like other 7000-series cards, the GHz Edition is based on AMD's new Graphics Core Next architecture, and is equipped with PowerTune and Zero Core Power technologies to better maximize and reduce power usage.
There are, however, a few key technical differences between the GHz Edition and its slower namesake. A 1.5GHz memory clock on the GHz Edition (up from 1,375MHz on the 7970) raises the data rate from 5.5Gbps to 6Gbps, and thus the memory bandwidth from 264GBps to 288GBps. Compute performance, texture fill rate, and pixel fill rate have all been upped as well (from 3.79 teraflops to 4.3 teraflops, from 118.4GTps to 134.4GTps, and from 29.6GPps to 33.6GPps respectively).
The 7970 GHz Edition includes another new feature: Boost. This technology can increase the engine clock speed to an average of 1.05GHz when the thermal and electrical headroom exist to accommodate it (AMD says it's possible for the card to be overclocked even higher manually). This is technology very similar to what we've seen from Nvidia on its 600-series video cards, and from both Intel and AMD on their recent-generation multi-core CPUs.
AMD claims that the 7970 GHz Edition, which is expected to be available from major board partners beginning next week for about $500 (roughly $20 more than the current list price for the 7970), will outperform Nvidia's , which our testing has determined is the fastest single-GPU video card currently available.
Check back to see whether the 7970 GHz Edition lives up to that hype, and whether it's the ideal video card to drive the next system you're building or upgrading, or just wish you were.