Videocards/VGA Reviews by stefan @ 2012-07-31
Thanks to the new price reductions, the vanilla RADEON HD 7970 from AMD still remains attractive, can deliver quite good performances even at high resolutions as 2560x1440 and when overclocked it becomes a serious competitor even for the Nvidias' flagship, the GTX 680.
CPU: Intel I5 3570K Retail @ 4.5GHz
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14
Motherboard: ECS Z77H2-AX Black Extreme
RAM: GeIL Black Dragon 2x4GB DDR2133 (@1600)
Video: AMD RADEON HD 7970
Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 320GB 7200.10
Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840
With the help of the GPU-Z 0.6.3 utility, we could extract lots of information regarding the video card clocks,memory type, pixel and texture fill rate and so on:
To extract even more information, we have used the AIDA64 utility:
Here are the CAL capabilities of the RADEON HD 7970:
For finding out the temperatures in both IDLE and Full Load with the fan set on Auto, we left the computer IDLE for about 25 minutes and then started monitoring with HWINFO32 and logged the values obtained while running Heaven 3.0 at 2560x1440 resolution, with details at maximum and Tesselation set to Extreme:
Before finding out the noise the video card was producing, I have first measured the noise inside the room the tests took place and I found out it was 29.7dBA (with everything turned off).
At all times, the sound meter was placed 20cm near the video card.
The GPU fan was controlled by the latest version of Catalyst Control Center:
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which comes with 900Mhz GPU (instead of stock 800Mhz) and features a 3 slot design for extremely silent cooling; does make a difference
but I meanly picked this card because of this
Full size DisplayPort Output, HDMI out and two DVI; that way I can keep my 3 monitor config without having to look into more adapters
reason for upgrade is because the HD6870 is getting a bit on the slow end at 5760*1200 resolution is recent games; Far Cry 3 was playable at low-med detail setting at ~30fps... with the 7950 that is bumped up to 40fps with high details