AMD: Southern Islands (7*** series) Speculation/ Rumour Thread
- Thread starter UniversalTruth
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Ninjaprime
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Please take my extra £130... I'll sign the cheque "I.M. A. SUCKER"
Sucks that you live where import fees and/or taxes make the price difference ridiculous, but thats no reason for you to try and smear the card in question. Here, on newegg, the difference is $50, and if you picked out any other slides than the worse scaling one in that review, you'd see that anything GPU limited scales right up with the stock overclock, and they got a really nice overclock out of it besides, almost up with a 6990/590 when overclocked.
I'm not sure why you're so hard-set against them.
Let's try to stick with architectural discussions. We all know some people will never spend more than a 100 dollars on a gpu and some people will mortgage their house to acquire one. If you truly feel this needs to be discussed in further detail, create a new thread in the proper sub-forum.
TweakPC were able to overclock that XFX "Black Edition Double Dissipation" card to 1300/1500 MHz at a mildly raised core voltage of 1.25V. The thing barring a higher overclock was allegedly some BIOS limit (they are looking into flashing another BIOS to remove that). So there may be some cards with a higher core clock than just 1 GHz on the horizon. I guess it also depends a bit on Kepler.
But I'm really wondering about the voltages as there were some arguing from different sides that you can't overdrive the voltage of TSMCs HP process very well (compared to 40G). The default voltage of the 7970 is set 35% higher than the reference voltage of 28HP! Did AMD throw in something special to the mix or is it HPL after all?
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Is there anything at all actually pointing towards HP?
H's overclock review is up. At 1.260GHz/1725Mhz the card really shines in the games tested against an overclocked 580.
I'm not sure they would need to wait that long as the review shows what the card can do on drivers now. As we get near their release drivers should have offered some sort of improvements by then. Well, I can only hope it does :smile:. Also, look at the thermals. The 7970 at 75% fan usage provides a lower temp then the 580 at the same fan usage. However, I do recall something about them using a different fan design though.
Summary
I want to see the price and performance on the Sapphire 1325Mhz core card.
The BF3 performance boost in the [H] review is incredible! Even Dooby can't hate
Indeed not. I've said many a time that I'll probably buy that 1335mhz core one if it shows up. My issue is with the vanilla cards. It feels like, one way or another, that we're being ripped off. The card overclocks like a beast and the fan is seemingly set way too high. I'm somewhat prepared to believe that AMD made a 50% faster part and willingly downclocked it to a 20% faster part, just to cream more money from us for slightly OC'd parts. The 7970 is a good chip; the 7970 is a poor card. The improvements to the ROPs are good, but I still hold that it should have had either 48ROPs or a 1300mhz core from the get go.
Wow, Quad-Fire that actually scales, I had no idea AMD was taking it seriously: several games scaling above 300% is not bad at all.
I agree on the slightly too aggressive fan settings, but I don't think selling a lot higher clocked card was really an option. Well first for the ram it sounds like a complete no-go to go over the specs of the chips so the potential there is limited (~9%). As for the chip well maybe slightly higher (something like that nice 1000Mhz number...) would probably be ok too but that's also only 9%. For more you'd need to increase the default voltage (you really can't squeeze out the last Mhz for a retail product) which means your power draw is now outside what you should draw from those connectors (300W), plus this will increase fan noise quite a bit (and people were already complaining about that, even if it was partially due to fan profile).
(Unless I'm mistaken PowerTune doesn't actually measure power draw, it is based on some internal chip usage factors, hence if you overvolt I don't think it will actually prevent you from drawing more power than allowed, though the higher clocks should be factored in. Can't (well shouldn't some certainly do...) really do that for a retail product neither.)
So I think AMD went with the sane option, while allowing OC cards which are still sane and something like 10% faster (I guess the partners really like that...). The insane settings are best left to individual customers
.The reason for it was to point out gpu temps not the fan speed in and of itself. At 75% fan speed with temps at 72C the OC gpu (@ 1.260 GHz) is still cooler in that review then it was at stock. Although at stock it was at 47% at 81C. Point being, it looked like they could have lowered the fan speed and could still matched the 580's temp if not bet it.
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Ah yes. Looks like that fan is quite a killer actually. Might not be the best choice though (might have higher minimum fan speed than others with a lower max fan speed). I wonder how it sounds at that 75% setting - I guess not even the hardcore overclocker could survive the 100% setting which might have potentially enabled a tiny bit higher OC
. Well hardocp says it was loud and noisy and "could be considered annoying to some" at 75%, but they say it is "silent" at 48%. I think their definition of silent is very different from mine...
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