Radeon HD 7970 official at January 9th with the price $549, Specification, Feature, Review

Once again AMD has introduced its new flagship desktop graphics card with powerful in nature, the Radeon HD 7970. While the $549 super board won’t hit retailers until January 9, the first reviews are going on, and as expected, the AMD Radeon HD 7970 ($549 list) is the latest fastest and most feature-rich single-GPU card ever. There was speculation that the 7970 could hang with dual-GPU.

All of this has lead to a perfect storm of anticipation for what has become the Radeon HD 7970: not only is it the first video card based on a 28nm GPU, but it’s the first member of the Southern Islands and by extension the first video card to implement GCN. As a result the Radeon HD 7970 has a tough job to fill, as a gaming card it not only needs to deliver the next-generation performance gamers expect, but as the first GCN part it needs to prove that AMD’s GCN architecture is going to make them a competitor in the GPU computing space. Can the 7970 do all of these things and live up to the anticipation? Let’s find out…

AMD GPU Specification Comparison
	AMD Radeon HD 7970	AMD Radeon HD 6970	AMD Radeon HD 6870	AMD Radeon HD 5870
Stream Processors	2048	1536	1120	1600
Texture Units	128	96	56	80
ROPs	32	32	32	32
Core Clock	925MHz	880MHz	900MHz	850MHz
Memory Clock	1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective) GDDR5	1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective) GDDR5	1.05GHz (4.2GHz effective) GDDR5	1.2GHz (4.8GHz effective) GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	384-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Frame Buffer	3GB	2GB	1GB	1GB
FP64	1/4	1/4	N/A	1/5
Transistor Count	4.31B	2.64B	1.7B	2.15B
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 28nm	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 40nm
Price Point	$549	$350	$160	-

AMD Radeon HD 7970 is the replacement for AMD's fastest single-GPU graphics card to date, the HD 6970. The new card increases transistor count from 2.6b to 4.3b, cranks the engine clock speed up from 880MHz to 925MHz, and adds 33 percent more Stream processors, jumping from 1,536 to 2,048. VRAM is also up from 2GB to 3GB — with a 384-bit memory interface for a bandwidth of 264GBps — but the most important change is in internal architecture, with the new Graphics Core Next setup promising to untap the card's potential to perform more computational tasks (i.e. GPGPU) without sacrificing any of its gaming prowess.

Looking at specifications specific to the 7970, AMD will be clocking it at 925MHz, giving it 3.79TFLOPs of theoretical computing performance compared to 2.7TFLOPs under the much different VLIW4 architecture of the 6970. Meanwhile the wider 384bit GDDR5 memory bus for 7970 will be clocked at 1.375GHz (5.5GHz data rate), giving it 264GB/sec of memory bandwidth, a significant jump over the 176GB/sec of the 6970.

Where the 7970 really distinguished itself was in terms of power usage. AMD's efforts in this regard really paid off, as our test bed was able to idle at an impressive minimum of 99.8 watts; that's less than we saw with either the 6970 (107.8) or the GTX 580 (117.3). But when running under full graphics load the 7970's full-system power draw rose to only 245.9 watts—again, this is below the results we got from both the 6970 (249.8 watts) and the GTX 580 (264.6 watts), and the 7970 gives you the most polygon-pushing power.

So, folks, it's that time again to declare a new Editors' Choice and a new "sensibly priced" (as opposed to the dual-GPU models, anyway) enthusiast video card. No matter what game you want to play or, within reason, what resolution you want to play it at, this is the one-GPU card that will excel most at the job best. Its price may still be steep, and you may be able to find GTX 580 cards on the market for less (around $500), but if full-tilt gaming without compromises is what you crave, you won't be able to do better than the AMD Radeon HD 7970. At least for a while.

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