ChrisMorley
01-11-2012, 05:19 PM
53Haven’t the past twelve months been awesome? New CPU’s from Intel and AMD, great graphics from NVIDIA and AMD, and plenty of great games like Battlefield 3 and Skyrim. It just doesn’t get much better than this! So of course we’re excited to talk to you about our latest flagship offering from one of our valued partners, this time AMD. AMD is first to market with a 28nm graphics processing unit – the chip that’s responsible for all the pretty pixels you see in a game. It’s one of the single most important choices a gamer will make. AMD thinks you’ll choose Radeon with their latest offering, and we think they make a compelling case! I’d also like to introduce to you our official AMD rep – forum user AMD Robert. He’ll be happy to answer direct questions from you about AMD products! Where else can you get that kind of service?
So, let’s get started. What is the Radeon HD 7970? It’s what we’d call a true next-generation product. A true next generation product typically combines a new architecture with a new fabrication process. It’s risky, but the pay offs are huge. Did you know that AMD has been tweaking their same graphics architecture for four years, starting with the R600? Even the super-fast Radeon HD 6990 is a derivative of the original Radeon HD 2900XT. How times have changed.
AMD is introducing an all new architecture, dubbed Graphics Core Next, and it’s fast! I won’t go into the details, there are many technical sites out there that will fill you in, but the basics can be boiled down to these bullet points (vs Radeon HD 6970):
· 2048 Stream Processors vs 1536 (new architecture as well)
· 128 Texture Units vs 96
· 32 ROPs (more efficient design)
· 925MHz Core Clock vs 880MHz (and EXTREMELY overclockable)
· 5.5GHz Effective 3GB Memory vs 4.2GHz Effective 2GB Memory
· 4.31 Billion Transistors vs 2.64 Billion
· 28nm vs 40nm
· Eyefinity 3D
· DirectX 11.1
There are many more awesome features that I urge you to research like partially resident textures and its compute prowess, but this blog post is to let you know that a) the Radeon HD 7970 is here, b) the Radeon HD 7970 is FAST, and c) we have the Radeon HD 7970.
We’re currently offering the Radeon HD 7970 in our SHIFT, F131, and X-Cube desktops. Shortly we’ll be adding them to the Vybe. We are offering them in up to 3-way CrossFire in our flagship SHIFT, and they are wicked fast. We’ll show you that the scaling is there for three way and also how much more power you get when overclocking. So, without further ado, let’s get to some benchmarks!
We've run every benchmark to the max at 2560x1600. We've turned every dial up, and we really wanted to punish these cards. We've compared to a special, 3GB non-reference designed GTX 580 3GB card from EVGA to try to even the playing field a bit, as the prices are almost exactly the same.
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As you can see, the 7970 is a force to be reckoned with. And we were excited to see 3-way scale so well! Wanna know the best part though? When you're just surfing the internet and you have a 2x or 3x CrossFire system, all but the primary cards actually TURN OFF. That's right, the fans even stop spinning. So for those of you worried about having an energy ****ing high-powered gaming PC, worry no-longer.
The bottom line is the Radeon HD 7970 is a fantastic addition to our stable of products. It's the first with 28nm and DirectX 11.1, and we're very happy that we've seen tremendous performance and stability with them. We think that our customers should definitely give it their consideration.
So, let’s get started. What is the Radeon HD 7970? It’s what we’d call a true next-generation product. A true next generation product typically combines a new architecture with a new fabrication process. It’s risky, but the pay offs are huge. Did you know that AMD has been tweaking their same graphics architecture for four years, starting with the R600? Even the super-fast Radeon HD 6990 is a derivative of the original Radeon HD 2900XT. How times have changed.
AMD is introducing an all new architecture, dubbed Graphics Core Next, and it’s fast! I won’t go into the details, there are many technical sites out there that will fill you in, but the basics can be boiled down to these bullet points (vs Radeon HD 6970):
· 2048 Stream Processors vs 1536 (new architecture as well)
· 128 Texture Units vs 96
· 32 ROPs (more efficient design)
· 925MHz Core Clock vs 880MHz (and EXTREMELY overclockable)
· 5.5GHz Effective 3GB Memory vs 4.2GHz Effective 2GB Memory
· 4.31 Billion Transistors vs 2.64 Billion
· 28nm vs 40nm
· Eyefinity 3D
· DirectX 11.1
There are many more awesome features that I urge you to research like partially resident textures and its compute prowess, but this blog post is to let you know that a) the Radeon HD 7970 is here, b) the Radeon HD 7970 is FAST, and c) we have the Radeon HD 7970.
We’re currently offering the Radeon HD 7970 in our SHIFT, F131, and X-Cube desktops. Shortly we’ll be adding them to the Vybe. We are offering them in up to 3-way CrossFire in our flagship SHIFT, and they are wicked fast. We’ll show you that the scaling is there for three way and also how much more power you get when overclocking. So, without further ado, let’s get to some benchmarks!
We've run every benchmark to the max at 2560x1600. We've turned every dial up, and we really wanted to punish these cards. We've compared to a special, 3GB non-reference designed GTX 580 3GB card from EVGA to try to even the playing field a bit, as the prices are almost exactly the same.
54
55
56
As you can see, the 7970 is a force to be reckoned with. And we were excited to see 3-way scale so well! Wanna know the best part though? When you're just surfing the internet and you have a 2x or 3x CrossFire system, all but the primary cards actually TURN OFF. That's right, the fans even stop spinning. So for those of you worried about having an energy ****ing high-powered gaming PC, worry no-longer.
The bottom line is the Radeon HD 7970 is a fantastic addition to our stable of products. It's the first with 28nm and DirectX 11.1, and we're very happy that we've seen tremendous performance and stability with them. We think that our customers should definitely give it their consideration.