Hardware Award
GIGABYTE R797TO-3GD
RRP: $449.99 | Website: www.gigabyte.com
Test Machine
Intel Core i7 3770K
Corsair Dominator Platinum
2666C10
Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H (F1)
CoolerMaster 1.5KW PSU
Windows7 64-Bit
I
f you gazed at the
performance results, you’ll
have noticed that we have
no overclocked results. The
reason for that is twofold.
First, we had an issue with
the particular sample of the
graphics card, where it would
not overclock much past
the reference 1.1GHz clock
(isolated to this particular
sample only!). Secondly, there
would be no point at this
juncture. What we’ve noticed is
that a lot of the gains to be had
with the HD7970 actually stem
from the driver releases and
32 The OverClocker Issue 22 | 2012
not overclocking.
With the GHz edition cards,
what AMD was announcing was
essentially a driver update and
a BIOS. Well aware of this we
took it upon ourselves to see
just how much has changed
with the latest (at the time)
Catalyst 12.11 beta 11 drivers
in comparison to the release
driver.
Before we delve into the
performance differences, it’s
worth noting that the release
driver for the HD7970 was very
unstable. We had constant
crashes at random intervals
and the situation was so dire
at some point we considered
later drivers. However we
managed to get through all
the benchmarks in the end. So
not only did AMD improve on
performance, but we’d wager
that most users will appreciate
the stability in the long run
rather than the higher fps.
We would also like to
highlight to you that with the
older Catalyst 11.12 driver our
maximum CPU overclock was
a whole 200MHz lower than
it was with the Catalyst 12.11
driver. The benchmarks would
crash at random times, yet
finish at other times (hence the
results you see) and we only
had total stability at 4600MHz
as opposed to 4800MHz.
Something to ponder about if
you have had an overclocking
session with the early
drivers that proved to be very
frustrating on a CPU you were
confident about.
On to the performance then
as the HD7970 is presented
today. This is essentially what
the entire point of this review
and editorial piece is about.
AMD has been optimizing in
general but more importantly
specific titles and benchmarks.
You should note that we did
not use any of the CAP updates
but simply used the driver
package as is. 3DMark03 sees
no changes at all, which is
expected as neither NVIDIA
nor AMD are concerned with
a legacy benchmark. Where
we do see sizeable changes
are in the benchmarks with
tessellation more specifically