AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition: Taking Back the Crown

An anonymous reader writes "The benchmarks are in for the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. Starting at $500, AMD's new single-GPU flagship boosts the original 7970's clock speed from 925 MHz to 1 GHz (1050 MHz with Boost). The GHz Edition also sports 3 GB of faster 1500 MHz GDDR5 memory, pushing 288 GB/s as opposed to 264 GB/s. While the AMD reference board runs hot and loud, retail boards will use different cooling solutions. A simple test of aftermarket GPU coolers shows that any other option will shave degrees and slash decibels. But it's the Catalyst 12.7 beta driver that really steals the show for AMD, pushing FPS scores into overdrive. With the new Catalyst, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 670 can no longer beat the original Radeon HD 7970, and the GHz Edition outmaneuvers the GeForce GTX 680 in most cases. However, when factoring price and possible overclocking into the equation, the original Radeon HD 7970 and GeForce GTX 670 remain the high-end graphics cards to beat."

Comments

which OTHER ati card should I buy?

[ClioCJS]

My x1950 sucks for 1080p video (since, y'know, the HD line was the NEXT card after that), but it's fine for QuakeLive, which is the only game I really care about that much. But I know they have cards that "game good, video bad" as well as "game bad, video good". It's frustrating trying to figure out which product I should buy. My card was $200 in 2007. If I don't really want that much more than what I got then, why would I want to pay $500?

Now, I'm an ATI man who's been using TV out since 1995, non-stop. But I'm not willing to throw them so much money, especially when I have to change my entire operating system to accommodate their abandonment of "old" OSes like XP. Man, that jump to 64bit required updating so many scripts, and replacing so many utilities. Don't force change on me and I might give you more money, ATI.

I like stories.

Re:which OTHER ati card should I buy?

[YodasEvilTwin]

Got a couple 6950's recently for ~$250 each and they've been great for games and videos. One was an older rev that crashed the driver, but Diamond replaced it with no questions asked and the new one works fine. For games that support Crossfire I get basically the performance of a 6990 for 2/3rds the price, and alternative frame rendering isn't too bad for other games either (I can play SWTOR on full settings at 1080p with no issues).

Re:which OTHER ati card should I buy?

[Aranykai]

If you aren't gaming, just grab a mid range 5xxx series and you will be fine. Should have very little trouble finding one for less than $80.

If you want more than that, get a HD 6770. You can have em for about $115 and it should keep up with any HD, moderate gaming(as long as you don't expect maxed settings) and should last you another 3/4 years before its too outdated.

There is no reason to spend more than $200 on a video card unless you are doing hardcore gaming on multiple or high resolution monitors.

I'm done with spendy, top of the line cards

[ackthpt]

All of my expensive fancy video cards have died, usually right after any kind of warranty and I'm squeeking by on some horribly low res, limited palette and no hardware acceleration for graphics. But at least it's reliable!

Re:I'm done with spendy, top of the line cards

[Ogi_UnixNut]

Ditto! I kept buying top end Nvidia cards for CUDA work, only to have them die just after the warranty, usually a year or so. I dug out an old Nvidia Quadro 285 card from the early 2000's, and am using it again. Also the 8400gs I got works just peacy for simple CUDA stuff.

It is like they engineer their top end cards to fail after a year or so, no matter what. My GTX 280 never went beyond 50 degrees, and was underclocked to boot (I didn't need all the power). Yet it died after a year or so, about as long as the 8800GTX I had beforehand.

The Quadro has been in use in some form for more than half a decade, and it still does 99% of what I need (Apart from the CUDA stuff, otherwise it would be perfect). Their older stuff seems more solid.

Re:I'm done with spendy, top of the line cards

[ackthpt]

Ditto! I kept buying top end Nvidia cards for CUDA work, only to have them die just after the warranty, usually a year or so. I dug out an old Nvidia Quadro 285 card from the early 2000's, and am using it again. Also the 8400gs I got works just peacy for simple CUDA stuff.

It is like they engineer their top end cards to fail after a year or so, no matter what. My GTX 280 never went beyond 50 degrees, and was underclocked to boot (I didn't need all the power). Yet it died after a year or so, about as long as the 8800GTX I had beforehand.

The Quadro has been in use in some form for more than half a decade, and it still does 99% of what I need (Apart from the CUDA stuff, otherwise it would be perfect). Their older stuff seems more solid.

My suspicion, after looking at a few cards under a loupe, is the technology is exceding the board itself to host such densely packed, current hungry and heat producing electronics. To be able to sell and profit from these units they are produced rapidly by a robotic assembly line. If they slowed that line down a bit the failure rate would decline, but they rather operate under an acceptable rate of failure (early or later) as the assembly line will be tooled for something else after the run.

Our older cards place less physical and environmental demands upon the 7 (or more) layer circuit boards and that's why they still hold up. Possibly they came through the production line at a slightly slower pace, too.

Re:I'm done with spendy, top of the line cards

[Anonymous Coward]

There are differences between the professional lines (Quadro, Tesla, FireGL, Firestream) and the consumer lines (GeForce and Radeon). The professional lines are built for the GPU manufactures to controlled specs and designed for longer life. The consumer lines are built by OEMs from a reference design with incentives to push clock speeds and component specs to the limit.

Your experience likely has more to do with the old card being a Quadro than it does with newer cards being more fragile.

Re:I'm done with spendy, top of the line cards

[JonySuede]

this is the detailed article explaining why the things are the way they are : http://www.geeks3d.com/20100504/tutorial-graphics-cards-voltage-regulator-modules-vrm-explained/2/

Re:I'm done with spendy, top of the line cards

[JonySuede]

I forgot to add to read that one after reading the page I linked : http://www.geeks3d.com/20091209/geforce-gtx-275-vrm-damaged-by-furmark/

Re:I'm done with spendy, top of the line cards

[F34nor]

You might try heating them in the oven to reflux the solder. It worked from my D820 laptop motherboard.

AMD Linux support sucks

[rtkluttz]

Regardless Torvalds recently getting his feathers ruffled with Nvidia.... In most cases Nvidia just works on Linux. I swore off AMD/ATI loooong back because JUST about time they finally get a decent proprietary linux driver support for one of their chipsets, it drops off the back side of support. I DESPISE forced upgrades and won't get caught in that trap again. All of our perfectly working AMD video laptops still work great but no proprietary driver support and the open source driver is waaaay worse. Nvidia proprietary drivers still support VERY old chipsets.

Re:AMD Linux support sucks

[Tough Love]

The open source Radeon driver works just fine, I'm using it for heavy 3D work right now. Not the case with NVidia. Linus had every reason to flip NVidia the bird, especially considering NVidia's ambition to win bags of gold selling Android chipsets.

Re:AMD Linux support sucks

[GrumpyOldMan]

+1 I had an ATI in my last Linux desktop. Never again.

The proprietary fglrx drivers tend to have weird bugs and as you say, they drop chips that are old enough to have decent support. On the flip-side, the open-source radeon drivers tend to require various bleeding edge bits and pieces to work correctly, so they are nearly impossible to run on stable distros, like an Ubuntu LTS or a RHEL.

Nividia's proprietary drivers just work, once you finally figure out how to blacklist nouveau hard enough that it doesn't get loaded via the initrd. Plus they support VDPAU for projects like MythTV and XBMC.

Re:AMD Linux support sucks

[ianare]

Funny you should mention that right when AMD wins a huge order of graphic chips precisely because they have open source drivers.

And anecdotally, I've never had a problem with AMD hardware, generally by the time the proprietary driver loses support, the open source one matches its performance.

Re:One word, "BITCOIN"

[h4rr4r]

What is this "a lot of the market"?
You really think more than a tiny percentage of folks use these cards for bitcoin?

Most people prefer to play games with them, instead of entering into pyramid schemes. Cash out while you still can.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:X2

[steelfood]

Forget X2. I want an All-In-Wonder version.

Completely unrelated /. trivia, but I just noticed the captcha isn't required at all for posting if logging in at the same time.

5% more shiniez? I *must* have one!

[Leo Sasquatch]

OMG, does this mean I can now run Crysis at 80fps instead of 75? F**k me sideways with a spastic badger, my life is now complete.

Why does anyone care that the two major card makers are still in their dick-waving war? Is it just to keep the review sites in business? Hey, look, another new top-of-the-range GFX card, not totally dis-similar to the one we reviewed last month, only we got it for free, and you'll have to part with some serious wedge if you want to have the same toys as the cool kids!

There have been no real, serious differences between any of the last dozen iterations of hardware. Anything made in the last couple of years should run any game on the market at full shiniez at decent resolution. It won't, sadly, make the gameplay any better.

Re:Is ATI coming back?

[Sir_Sri]

Competitive is an odd word in the hardware business. If you want to spend 1200 dollars on a CPU does AMD have a competitive offering? How about 500? What's the different in performance between a 500 dollar part and a 1200 dollar one?

With GPU's AMD and nVIDIA are pretty close in rendering performance, for specialized tasks (GPU computing) particular hardware may favour one guy over the other. But if 90% of the market is in GPU parts that cost less than 400 dollars, whether or not you hold the top spot at the 500 dollar price point doesn't really matter. It's more of an advertising problem than a technical one.

Some of us (myself included) have things like GTX 680's, 5970's and so on, those can be 600, 800 dollar parts. They aren't cheap, but they also aren't normal. If you wanted to buy a 350 dollar GPU from Newegg or equivalent yesterday both nVIDIA and AMD had competitive parts in that price bracket. Even at the top end, the 7970 was slower, but not much slower overall than the competitively priced nVIDIA part, and we're talking about theoretical performance anyway, experience with a specific game and driver support matters a lot to the experience.

And while yes, the graphics division of AMD is still based in Markham as time goes on we're seeing more integrated CPU-GPU products. That's not really the segment we're talking about here, but they're very much becoming an integrated outfit.