Date:
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Author:
Grady McKinney
Editor:
Brent Justice
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ASUS Radeon HD 7970 Video Card Review

ASUS has released its baseline model of the recently released Radeon HD 7970. We will be compare the performance of the ASUS Radeon HD 7970 out-of-box against the highest overclock achieved with voltage tweaking, along with a Radeon HD 6970, and a reference clock GeForce GTX 580.

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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 MSI Eclipse SLI X58 motherboard, an Intel Core i7 920 Overclocked at 3.6GHz, and 6GB of Corsair TR3X6G1600C8D Dominator DDR3.

We make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the i7-920 at 3.6GHz seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

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Important Note: We gave AMD every opportunity to get us a new driver in time for this evaluation, but that did not happen. We ended up having to use the Web Release driver dated 1/9 for this evaluation at the time, which is based on the December 20th launch review driver. At the end of testing, the new RC11 driver was released, but by that time all of our testing was completed. For your information, the RC11 version is also based on 11.12 as this driver is. Future evaluations will use the newer RC11 driver. You can read our AMD CrossFireX Drivers - Opportunity Lost article for further information on driver disappointments.

For the ASUS Radeon HD 7970 we are using the web driver dated called "AMD_Radeon_HD_7900_Win7_64_Dec20.exe." This is the exact same driver as the 1/9 Web Driver. This is also the same driver as the December 20th test driver handed out by AMD for reviewers. This was the latest driver available at the time of testing this video card.

For the AMD Radeon HD 6970 we are using AMD Catalyst 12.1a Preview driver. This was the most recent driver at the time of the evaluation.

For the GeForce GTX 580 we are using NVIDIA's latest BETA driver ForceWare 290.53 BETA.

Below is a screenshot of GPU-Z after installing the ASUS Radeon HD 7970 and the Radeon HD 7970 dated 1/9 Web Driver.

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