ASUS Radeon HD 7970 CrossFire Review

Name: ASUS Radeon HD 7970 CrossFire
Brand: ASUS

W1zzard

on Jan 8th, 2012,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: ASUS

(65 Comments) »

Introduction

AMD's Radeon HD 7970 was successfully launched on December 22 last year as the fastest single GPU graphics card in the world. Until today only reviews of AMD cards were allowed, so today we bring you a review of the ASUS Radeon HD 7970 in multi GPU CrossFire mode.

If you haven't done so yet, check out our single card HD 7970 review for the architecture update and card photos.

Instead of just placing a simple sticker on their HD 7970, ASUS has decided to go with a little bit more effort. The company has put a 3D shaped metal "cap" on the middle section of the card, where usually an ATI red shines. As you can see from the picture above, the ASUS design looks mighty good and clearly improves the looks of the Raden HD 7970. Great job ASUS! For overclockers ASUS includes their own GPUTweak software which supports the HD 7970 for overclocking, voltage control and GPU information.

In terms of specs, the card comes at the same clock speeds as the AMD reference design, running at 925 MHz core and 1375 MHz memory. Pricing is unchanged too, $550 for a single card, twice that, $1100 for the dual card CrossFire combination we test in this review.

ASUS Radeon HD 7970 CrossFire Market Segment Analysis
	GeForce GTX 560	GeForce GTX 560 Ti	GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 C	Radeon HD 6950	GeForce GTX 570	Radeon HD 6970	GeForce GTX 580	Radeon HD 7970	Radeon HD 6990	GeForce GTX 590	ASUS HD 7970 CrossFire
Shader Units	336	384	448	1408	480	1536	512	2048	2x 1536	2x 512	2x 2048
ROPs	32	32	40	32	40	32	48	32	2x 32	2x 48	2x 32
Graphics Processor	GF114	GF114	GF110	Cayman	GF110	Cayman	GF110	Tahiti	2x Cayman	2x GF110	2x Tahiti
Transistors	1950M	1950M	3000M	2640M	3000M	2640M	3000M	4310M	2x 2640M	2x 3000M	2x 4310M
Memory Size	1024 MB	1024 MB	1280 MB	2048 MB	1280 MB	2048 MB	1536 MB	3072 MB	2x 2048 MB	2x 1536 MB	2x 3072 MB
Memory Bus Width	256 bit	256 bit	320 bit	256 bit	320 bit	256 bit	384 bit	384 bit	2x 256 bit	2x 384 bit	2x 384 bit
Core Clock	810 MHz	823 MHz	732 MHz	800 MHz	732 MHz	880 MHz	772 MHz	925 MHz	830 MHz	607 MHz	925 MHz
Memory Clock	1002 MHz	1002 MHz	950 MHz	1250 MHz	950 MHz	1375 MHz	1002 MHz	1375 MHz	1250 MHz	855 MHz	1375 MHz
Price	$180	$210	$290	$250	$330	$340	$500	$549	$700	$750	$1100

Test System

Test System - VGA Rev. 16
CPU:	Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.8 GHz (Bloomfield, 8192 KB Cache)
Motherboard:	Gigabyte X58 Extreme Intel X58 & ICH10R
Memory:	3x 2048 MB Mushkin Redline XP3-12800 DDR3 @ 1520 MHz 8-7-7-16
Harddisk:	WD Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS 500 GB
Power Supply:	Antec HCP-1200 1200W
Software:	Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1
Drivers:	NVIDIA: 285.62 ATI: Catalyst 11.12 HD 7970: Dec 16 Reviewer Driver
Display:	LG Flatron W3000H 30" 2560x1600

Benchmark scores in other reviews are only comparable when exactly the same hardware & software configuration is used as in this review.

All video card results were obtained on this exact system with the exact same configuration.
All games were set to their highest quality setting unless indicated otherwise.
AA and AF are applied via in-game settings, not via the driver's control panel.

Each benchmark was tested at the following settings and resolution:

1024 x 768, No Anti-aliasing. This is a standard resolution without demanding display settings.
1280 x 1024, 2x Anti-aliasing. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens today (17" - 19"). A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.
1680 x 1050, 4x Anti-aliasing. Most common widescreen resolution on larger displays (19" - 22"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
1920 x 1200, 4x Anti-aliasing. Typical widescreen resolution for large displays (22" - 26"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
2560 x 1600, 4x Anti-aliasing. Highest possible resolution for commonly available displays (30"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.

Aliens vs. Predator

Aliens vs. Predator is based on a merger of the Aliens and the Predators franchise: two legendary alien species that are in conflict with each other, fighting to the death with human marines caught in between. The first person shooter game was developed by Rebellion Studios, who also developed the first AVP PC title and released in February 2010. It is one of the first DirectX 11 games with support for new features like tesselation, which is why AMD heavily promoted it at the time of their DX 11 card launches. We use the AVP benchmark utility with tesselation and advanced DX11 shadows enabled.