AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB Graphics Card Review

Talk of new technology and new cards being delivered onto the market is always a fantastic thing in this industry, and it gives consumers something to look forward to, gives retailers an opportunity to market and gives us reviewers something new to test and play about with. As we didn’t have mass amounts of time, we didn’t look at the 7970 as much as we’d hoped, but with CES approaching, and the official partner launch being at the heart of it, we know we’re see some interesting things then, and we will be at CES ourselves getting you that first-hand information direct to you.

Being a reference card, we knew that some drawbacks would be visible, and this is normally reflected in the cooler, and not the performance, but the 7970 surprised us to say the least. We heard about the performance leaks before the launch, but you can never take these as 100% accurate, even when we source them and publish the leaks ourselves, but it seems as though this card really did come up trumps.

The 7970 showed performance like we’ve never seen on a single GPU card before, with blistering fast results in every test we ran, on multiple resolutions. When looking at 3DMark 11, comparing to the 6970, the card shot forward by over 2000 points. Heaven saw some immense leaps and bounds in frame-rate and real-world gaming showed how powerful this card really is.

Eyefinity was something we were really interested in testing, as it really pushes a graphics card to the limit, and that’s exactly what happened here. Normally when this happens, we see the card being put under mass amounts of pressure and weakening at the knees, but the 7970 didn’t let up in the slightest, with every test giving strong, reliable results with playable frame-rates. Even the likes of Metro 2033 with its glorious graphics and heavy tessellation, still managed to show some amazing potential.

Speaking of tessellation, it does seem that AMD have tweaked it on the 7970 and for the right reasons, and this is shown in Metro and of course Heaven, where tessellation is a major key factor that really allows the best possible graphics to be shown by the build up of the wire-frame models and 3D worlds. The 7970 simply ate these two benchmarks for breakfast and was still wanting more, and it’s no surprise after hearing that AMD had improved this main aspect of the cards DNA so to speak.

The cooler, even though incorporating a reference design, still showed some great potential in terms of acoustics and temperatures. Sure it’s noisy when on load, but what card isn’t, and we expect that from a reference card none the less. What did shock us, were the low idle temperatures which clearly shows the thought that has been put into the 6th generation vapour chamber cooling system that is on this card. What I’m looking forward to now, is the AMD partners such as Club3D, and Sapphire to really show us how a cooling solution should be implemented onto a card, which should hopefully open the doorway for lower temperatures, quieter operating, and maybe even some extreme overclocks from the factory.

The other aspect of this card that interests us is the new power saving technology that AMD have branded as ZeroCore which we proved, really does make a difference and in a world where nothing comes for free, and the price of electricity is soaring, every little saving really does impact on your wallet. AMD have considered this and have developed this card to give outstanding results for power draw and on idle we saw this in action. Even at load, for a card that performs like this, we were expecting much higher system draw from our test rig but to our amazement, the 7970 sat comfortably.

Until the official launch on the 9th January 2012, we can only show you what we have on offer here, but we can assure you that a lot of goodies will be shown from the AMD partners as they put their own personal touches upon this card. This is also a time when we can expect to see some solid pricing structures in place, but we can only speculate and go off what AMD say at around £450, but based on how this card performs, their should be some nice savings between this and a 6990 or GTX 590 which as we know involves taking out a second mortgage to buy, let alone run and some consumers are crazy enough to buy two.

2012 is certainly going to be an interesting year as AMD look at releasing a more budget-friendly 7950 as well as an insanely expensive and powerful 7990, but AMD have to cater for all markets, but for now, we can honestly say that the 7970 is the most powerful single core card to pass through our labs, and that’s why it can only be described as an “Extreme Performance” card.