Introduction

HD 7970 Market Segment Analysis GeForce

GTX 670 Radeon

HD 7970 GeForce

GTX 680 HD 7970

GHz Ed. MSI HD 7970

Lightning Gigabyte HD

7970 SuperOC Sapphire HD

7970 Toxic ASUS HD

7970 Matrix HIS HD 7970

X Turbo GeForce

GTX 690 Shader Units 1344 2048 1536 2048 2048 2048 2048 2048 2048 2x 1536 ROPs 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 32 2x 32 Graphics Processor GK104 Tahiti GK104 Tahiti Tahiti Tahiti Tahiti Tahiti Tahiti 2x GK104 Transistors 3500M 4310M 3500M 4310M 4310M 4310M 4310M 4310M 4310M 2x 3500M Memory Size 2048 MB 3072 MB 2048 MB 3072 MB 3072 MB 3072 MB 3072 MB 3072 MB 3072 MB 2x 2048 MB Memory Bus Width 256 bit 384 bit 256 bit 384 bit 384 bit 384 bit 384 bit 384 bit 384 bit 2x 256 bit Core Clock 915 MHz+ 925 MHz 1006 MHz+ 1050 MHz 1070 MHz 1080 MHz 1100 MHz 1100 MHz 1180 MHz 915 MHz+ Memory Clock 1502 MHz 1375 MHz 1502 MHz 1500 MHz 1400 MHz 1375 MHz 1500 MHz 1650 MHz 1500 MHz 1502 MHz Price $380 $390 $480 $400 $500 $500 $600 $500 $600 $1000

AMD's Radeon HD 7970 has been on the market for a while now. The card introduced a new shader architecture and brought numerous improvements in power consumption. It met heavy opposition from NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 and 670, which has caused HD 7970's pricing to go down quite a bit.We have seen several recent releases of premium HD 7970 variants geared towards overclocking through high clock-speeds and maximum cooling-power. Prominent members of these cards are the ASUS MATRIX, MSI Lightning, Gigabyte SuperOC, and Sapphire Toxic.HIS is now entering the arena with their HD 7970 X Turbo, which, unlike many other enthusiast HD 7970 cards, comes in a dual-slot form factor. The clock speeds have been increased significantly to 1180 MHz on the GPU, which is the highest GPU clock we've seen on an HD 7970, and 1500 MHz on the memory; only the ASUS MATRIX comes with a higher memory clock.Price-wise, HIS is also asking a lot. The card can be yours for $600.