HIS Radeon HD 7970 X Turbo edition review - Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

I'm impressed with what HIS delivered here. Really customized cards (aside from the cooler) has never been their thing. With this card they took the new Tahiti XT2 and redesigned the R7970 board from ground up, though the end result is a very long 31cm PCB with mane power phases and optimizations. Fun to see are the voltage and FAN monitor LED options. Most impressive however is the sheer amount of monitor connectors HIS injected into this product, four DisplayPort connectors, one HDMI and a DVI connector. If needed you can go for Eyefinity6.

All the monitor connectors do warrant a small issue though, heat can not be exhausted properly. So remember that your PC chassis will need good ventilation as heat will get trapped inside the chassis. 

The cooler itself is good. It offers excellent cooling performance and albeit it can be heard, it's not too loud. Considering the clock frequency this card runs at, that is actually impressive. Ands yeah we haven't talked about it, but this card boosts the GPU frequency towards a steep 1180 MHz, that really is mighty impressive and makes the card perform much better against it's direct competitor, the GeForce GTX 680. The results vary a little, here and there. But this HIS card is overall definitely stronger but in some places NVIDIA pulls ahead and that makes the end-result a little difficult as both sides have some extremes some wins and some losses. 

HIS has a trump card available though, their 7900 cards all start at 3 GB of graphics memory. And that is a key selling point for the product alright, especially if you want to play with silly AA levels or multiple monitor gaming. I mean this is the enthusiast segment of gaming, it's what gamers want. So props for that choice.

Game performance then, pretty much any game to date will run absolutely fine with even the best image quality settings enabled. And albeit this is an Eyefinity card, it's really perfect for 1920x1080/1200 and 2560x1440/1600 gamers.

So allow me to out some numbers, DX11 based Sniper Elite V2 at the excellent image quality settings in 1920x1200 pushes 50 FPS on average, the HIS R7970 X Turbo edition actually is the fastest single GPU based card with this title. Crysis 2 in DX11 with the HQ texture pack for example at the same resolution pumps out 72 FPS and Anno 2070 does an amazing 97 FPS at that resolution. All with excellent image quality settings and AA levels.

The weird thing remains that the R7970 overall is very strong in the new and latest titles, but seems to perform a little less with older titles however. Games like COD and Far Cry 2 is where the card seems a tad slower than the competition, however the older titles are still running 100+ FPS, so if you look at that retrospect... would that really be an issue for you? 

Hardware variables then. The cooling is sufficient enough and during gaming temperatures will stay at or below 70 Degrees C even below 60 on average. The IDLE noise levels are fine. When stressed massively the card will however be audible at a noticeable enough level. So that's ok, but not perfect.

The power consumption of this product remains okay as well, our measurements learn us that the board TDP is slightly below 230 Watts during stressed and hefty gaming. Please do remember, that's a peak measurement, not the average power consumption which is lower.

On the topic of power consumption, impressive remains the boards IDLE power state, we measure give or take 10 Watts in idle desktop mode and when not in use (monitor in energy saving mode) it can throttle down and disable huge segments of the GPU allowing it to draw 2.7 Watt only.

When you look at the overall package, performance, the new Eyefinity updates, PCIe gen 3 compatibility and all other stuff then we can only conclude that we happily embrace the Radeon HD 7970 GHz edition in the enthusiast graphics card arena. For those that embrace multi-monitor gaming will love the 3GB framebuffer / graphics memory.

Overclocking - with a card running at 1180 MHz it remains tricky to push it much higher as that is a far fetched clock frequency already alright. We increased voltage to 1.3V and that gave us the opportunity to increase the clock frequency to 1260 MHz on the graphics core.

The memory was able to be clocked at 1700 MHz, GDDR5 is quad data rate memory, so effectively it's doing 6800 without any issues. So yeah, once more we expect to hear about your overclock and tweak experiences in our forums a lot in the months to come. That again was something impressive to witness and certainly boosted performance even higher.

Let me wrap thing up, HIS is not too familiar with the enthusiast model graphics cards, and this is the first series they have released. I have to applaud them as the outcome is successful. The card looks great, the cooling is more than sufficient, though not 100% silent. Vastly impressive is the 1180 MHz boost frequency though, I have not seen any manufacturers do these kinds of clock frequencies at all. 

And then the extras like the custom PCB, the funky LEDs that monitor GPU Voltage and FAN RPM etc, it's just a really cool product. The plethora of monitor connectors is just as impressive, albeit we doubt that hardly anyone would use more than three monitors. Included is an active DP to DVI-S converter as well and you'll get a copy of Dirt Showdown for free as well. So really it's hard to deny that what HIS did here is just very impressive. If the all-customized-and-factory-overclocked R7970 is your cup of tea then really, definitely put the X turbo model on your short list. It's impressive.

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