AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB Graphics Card Review

With a new card comes new technologies or improved performance and to find out exactly where the extra performance has been pulled from, it’s worth looking at the specifications.

We can straight away see some distinct differences when we compare the 7970 to the older 6970. The first being that the 7970 is based around the 28nm process, making it the first card on the market with this manufacturing protocol.

We also find some differences in the amount of transistors, going from 2.64 billion to 4.31 billion. Let’s just hope AMD are correct on this, and haven’t miscounted as we know they have done before. There are plenty of other subtle differences but the main focus for us today involves the GPU core and memory speed.

The engine clock or core clock speed has been reaised from 880MHz to 925MHz and sees the card sporting 2048 stream processors and  includes 128 texture units over the 6970 with only 96.

Memory wise, the first thing to notice is the increase from 2GB GDDR5 to a whopping 3GB. The memory clock speed has remained the same at 1375MHz, though the bandwidth has been increased from 176 GB/s to 264 GB/s. All of this runs on a 384-bit memory interface to give the best possible performance.

Power wise we still see the card sporting the same 250W TDP to give a good balance between power and performance.

Some interesting specifications indeed, and with figures like we’ve seen above, the 7970 certainly looks promising from this angle, but the best way to find out how it compares is of course to install it on our mighty test bench. Before we do that however, it’s worth taking a look at the card itself to see if anything has changed aesthetically, or if AMD have simply used the older 6000 series reference design.