Radeon HD 7970 Overclock Guide - Introduction

Radeon HD 7970 Overclocking Guide

Last Thursday the Radeon HD 7970 launched, the product is creating a lot of buzz alright. Next to our reference review article we have shown you a CPU scaling article. There's still one bit missing though, tweaking performance.

Now initially I wanted to wait with this article until 3rd party tweak tools would allow for voltage tweaking on the Tahiti GPU. Unfortunately that might take a while as AMD hammered the API for accessing I2C bus completely shut.

Here at Guru3D we develop MSI's AfterBurner and while the VTweak project on the 7970 is work in progress I just couldn't let you miss out on default overclocking as the results are phenomenal really.

Here's a hint ...

Seriously, in the review we already mentioned that a little twiddling with the card allowed for much higher clock frequencies. However after actually spending more then 2 minutes I got flabbergasted. With only three steps you can clock the Radeon HD 7970 towards a blistering 1125 MHz on the graphics core, that's 200 MHz above reference at default voltage. The memory is clocked at 5500 MHz at default, well we can increase it towards 1575 MHz and that boils down to an effective data rate of 6300 MHz / Gbps (!)

All that without significant increases of heat and noise levels, hey once again we'll demonstrate it all. The Radeon HD was looking good already, but it's getting better and better with every hour that passes ...

Next page please.