Revised AMD Radeon 7970 In Works

AMD is planning to release a revised version of its Radeon HD 7970 GPU. The company plans to increase the core clock speed of the GPU from its current default value of 925MHz to 1000MHz. Cards based on this revised GPU will be christened "GHz Edition" to reflect their new core clock speed.

AMD Radeon HD 7970

Add-in partners already offer Radeon HD 7970 cards that have been overclocked up to 1010MHz but such cards don’t follow AMD’s reference specification. By increasing the default core clock speed of the Tahiti XT GPU, AMD is making a 1GHz card official. In terms of clock speed, it is still below that of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 that is rated at 1006MHz.

AMD says that it is able to Increase the clock speed due to improved silicon yields. The company claims that it now requires much less voltage to run a Radeon HD 7970-based card at 925MHz than it used to. AMD even claims that current yields of the Tahiti XT GPU are able to hit 1250MHz without special cooling. On our review of AMD Radeon 7900 series GPUs, we were able to overclock a reference AMD Radeon HD 7970 card's GPU core clock speed to 1125MHz for performance gains of up to 16%.

In our recent tests, we pitted a pair of Radeon HD 7970 cards in CrossFire setup against two SLI-enabled GeForce GTX 680 cards. The former pair from the Southern Islands were also put through their paces against the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690. Although NVIDIA took pole position in most of the tests, the showing from the AMD camp wasn't too poor either, as a matter of fact, they showed their mettle in more demanding benchmark tests, narrowing their loss margins.
Although raising its official core clock speed of the Radeon HD 7970 GPU still puts it a tad slower than NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680.by michael low, atomic mpc source