Final Words & Conclusion
Final Words & Conclusion
Initially when we went for an overclock in our reference review article we hit roughly 1050 MHz. At that stage I was like, hmm let's stop right here as I had a gazillion of tests to run left with this card and I did not want to fry it. Neither did I realistically speaking expect that it could even pass 1100 MHz. Man was I wrong, 1125 MHz is where the GPU slider maxes out other wise I'd would have moved it towards 1200 MHz to see what it can do really.
Once we have this card's circuitry properly supported in AfterBurner things will get even more interesting, with that software we can disable Powerplay (active power management) and this it's limitation and in the end we can't wait to see what voltage tweaking will do.
None the less, 1125 MHz on the core and 6300 MHz on the memory without any voltage tweaking has to be a new milestone all by itself. The advantage without added voltage is that the temperatures do not change that much, the noise levels remain okay and the power draw really isn't bad either.
I honestly do not understand that AMD did not clock the product higher at default, a nice full GHz would have been rather cool for e-peens sake. Perhaps they left some additional reserve for a future product, or tweaking headroom for the AIB/AIC partners, or well they simply felt that a product should have tweaking potential left.
It once again re-establishes the fact that AMD did their homework right on Tahiti, a sound architecture that allows to be clocked at insane speeds, well hats off for that.
We know that the upcoming 7950 will be freed from PCB limitations completely, board partners are allowed to design their own product. And man .. we do expect to see some good stuff when that happens.
I'm not going to make this conclusion any longer then needed, the Radeon HD 7970 is impressive at many fronts however we never expected the overclocking potential to be this good. It results in even faster performance while the surrounding conditions like TDP, heat and noise remain absolutely under control. That's free extra performance, at very little extra risk or annoyances.
And that's just lovely ....
But wait there's more content ... check out our Radeon HD 7970 review article right here as well as a new CPU scaliong guide right here.
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