AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Graphics Card Detailed

The AMD Radeon HD 7970 was a strong enough video card when it first emerged, but then NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 appeared, with a better performance and lower price to boot.

The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition is AMD's response to that perceived challenge, and now we know exactly what the specs are. It so happens that the “GHz Edition” moniker is not perfectly representative of the card's performance. What we mean to say is that, instead of running at 1 GHz like the name would suggest, the board does even better, pushing the GPU to 1,100 MHz. Speaking of which, the graphics processing unit is called Tahiti XT2 and based on a refined design from TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company). For those who don't remember, the original Radeon HD 7970 operates at 925 MHz, 175 MHz less than this newcomer.

Things get even more interesting when one realizes that the Tahiti XT2 manages the performance while using a lower core voltage: 1,020V instead of 1,175 V. All this information reached the Internet thanks to the folks over at Ocaholic.ch, but there was one detail they didn't provide: memory speed. The normal HD 7970 has 3 GB of GDDR5 at 1,375 MHz (5.5 GHz Effective). This, along with the interface of 384 bits, leads to a bandwidth of 264 GB/s. Advanced Micro Devices probably won't change the setting on the GHz Edition. That number is already high enough.

The report says that mass production of the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition will commence in about a week or so. That would put sales in the last week of June or early July. Now we just have to wait for those dual-GPU HD 7970 X2 to populate stores around the world and AMD has its full deck complete and ready for action again (August was the ETA, last we heard).

Posted in: Hardware, Preview