Leaked BIOS allows the conversion of the HD 7970 into a GHz Edition
Ryan Martin / 12 years ago
When the HD 7970 GHz Edition was released by AMD it wasn’t exacted hailed as a giant leap forward for AMD. The HD 7970 GHz Edition took a stock HD 7970, ramped up the clock speeds, voltages and introduced some new dynamic power and clock speed adjustment firmware.
Now an enthusiast has managed to get his hands on the HD 7970 GHz Edition BIOS file that allows for you to flash your HD 7970 into a HD 7970 GHz Edition. The change is very much reminiscent of the HD 6950 to HD 6970 BIOS flash that a lot of enthusiasts were doing back in the HD 6000 series.
Right from the get go we want to point out that we take no responsibility for any damage this MAY cause to your graphics card should it go wrong somehow. However, if you know what you’re doing this is a simple yet effective way to get some extra fire-power from your HD 7970.
The HD 7970 GHz Edition is not 100% physically identical to the HD 7970, it features improved sensors for more accurate PowerTune adjustments but that’s the only difference. And let’s be honest, the HD 6950 successfully converted to a HD 6970 for most people and it had 288 less Radeon cores – a major hardware difference. So in the grand scheme of things, this upgrade is much less risky.
The BIOS upgrade would change the following should you decide to do it:
- A higher GPU clockspeed of 1000MHz, up from the 7970′s 925MHz.
- A higher memory clockspeed of 1500MHz, up from the 7970′s 1375MHz.
- And PowerTune’s new “Boost” feature, which allows the graphics to dynamically overclock itself up to 1050MHz if the GPU has thermal headroom.
It’s worth pointing out that there are two main reasons why this BIOS upgrade might not work on your card.
- Some of the RAM on the HD 7970 standard edition cards out there might not be up to the job of reaching 1500MHz from 1375MHz.
- ASIC reasons – your chip may not be capable of reaching those speeds because of lower ASIC values (as indicated by GPU-Z) that mean your chip isn’t capable of reaching the 1000-1050MHz levels.
However, for the vast majority of people this should work and it is as easy as installing a simple file. To see if your card should work, we would suggest overclocking your card to 1500MHz memory (6GHz effective) and to 1050MHz on the core and check for stability.
You can find the file clearly labelled at the source, we don’t want to put a direct link to the file here in case you accidentally download it, autorun it and bake your card. To install it, make sure your video card is installed and you are logged in as an administrator then run the exe file found in the zip download. One reboot later and should have yourself a HD 7970 GHz Edition.
