Almost all 7970 reference cards OC to 1125/1575 easy, why just now compare the 1Ghz?

[Phusius]

Why are they just now comparing the 1 Ghz edition to the GTX 680... the 7970 OC's in CCC to 1125/1575 no sweat... I am actually kind of shocked AMD just didn't release the cards at these speeds, as my reference card never got hot or anything...

[pantherx12]

Originally Posted by Phusius

Why are they just now comparing the 1 Ghz edition to the GTX 680... the 7970 OC's in CCC to 1125/1575 no sweat... I am actually kind of shocked AMD just didn't release the cards at these speeds, as my reference card never got hot or anything...

Because it has come direct from AMD.

It's like the various CPUS people buying, they are generally lower clocked/chopped up versions of high end chips which allow a range of CPUS. ( yet they still count as different cpus right )

Hence this new 7970 being part of their range of devices thus it being compared to a 680.

Nvidia could do the exact same thing ( factory OC) and that card will be compared to this one.

[radrok]

I think they didn't clock it higher from the beginning because AMD launched the HD 7970 "in the dark", what I mean with that sentence is that they couldn't know about NVIDIA flagship performance and so they just clocked their product around good performance/temperatures/power draw and noise instead of going for higher performance at the cost of noise/power draw/temps

[the54thvoid]

What Radrok says. AMD released with clocks far lower than they should have. Nvidia were already behind and realised if they tweaked their gk104 core they could pretend their top end chip gk100 didn't matter because their gk104 chip could fight AMD's top effort. Had AMD released at 1050MHz core, then we would be in a whole different gpu reality. AMD's Tahiti core with it's GCN is kind of this season's Fermi. Hot and hungry but the better workhorse. Nvidia are using a compute limited chip with excellent driver support to compete.