Date:
Tuesday , January 24, 2012
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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XFX R7970 Black Edition Video Card Review

We have the new XFX R7970 Black Edition video card to evaluate, which is XFX's current flagship Radeon HD 7970 based video card. With a custom PCB, custom hardware components and custom cooling fan, will it take us to new heights in overclocking, or leave us wishing we had just purchased a "reference" card?

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Evaluation Method

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and "eye candy" graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing in with minimum, maximum, and average framerates.

Test System Setup

We will be using a ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution motherboard, an Intel Core i7 920 Overclocked to 3.6GHz, and 6GB of Corsair RAM.

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Drivers

For the MSI N580GTX Lightning XE 3GB video card we used ForceWare 290.53. This was the latest driver at time of testing.

For the XFX R7970 Black Edition we used AMD supplied driver for testing Radeon HD 7970 called "AMD_Radeon_HD_7900_Win7_64_Dec20.exe." This is exactly the same driver as the 1/9 Web Driver. This was the latest driver at the time of testing this video card. We tried many times for AMD to get us a newer driver to work with on this review, but we were fully done with game testing when the latest driver was released last Friday.

For the AMD Radeon HD 6970, we used the Catalyst 12.1a Preview driver.

Video Cards

We used default, out-of-the-box clock speeds on all video cards in this review. The AMD Radeon HD 6970 is an AMD reference card, so it is using AMD's reference clock speeds.

The MSI N580GTX Lightning XE 3GB is a factory overclocked video card with 3GB of memory. That's twice as much memory as a standard GeForce GTX 580, and the same amount of memory as is present on the XFX R7970 Black Edition video card. The standard clock rates on a GTX 580 are 772MHz on the graphics core, 1.544GHz on the shaders, and 4GHz on the memory. The N580GTX Lightning XE has its GPU core overclocked by 60MHz, its shader core overclocked by 120MHz, and its memory clock rate overclocked by 200MHz.

We are using this specific video card because it is the closest in price range to the $599 XFX R7970 video card. Also, with 3GB on board we will see if that holds any advantage in comparing to the Radeon HD 7970.

We will also be comparing out-of-box performance of the XFX R7970 Black Edition with the performance we observed after we overclocked it.

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