AMD Radeon HD 7970 review

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Verdict:

It's expensive, but this is easily the most powerful single-GPU graphics card we've seen

Review Date: 22 Dec 2011

Price when reviewed: £420

Reviewed By: Chris Finnamore

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

ExpertReviews Award

The HD 7970 also has plenty of overclocking headroom. Using AMD's Overdrive utility, we pushed the card up to 1,125MHz core speed and 1,575MHz memory speed, which saw our Crysis 2 test leap up to a huge 57.3fps - even faster than the HD 6990's 53fps. The card sounded like it was going to take off when running at these speeds, though.

The Radeon HD 7970 is a hugely impressive card. AMD has managed to squeeze a massive amount of power from a single GPU while keeping the power requirements the same as its significantly less powerful predecessor. All this power comes at a price - the card will be around £420 including VAT when it launches. This makes it around 35 per cent more expensive than the Radeon HD 6970 for 30 per cent more performance. Compared to its rival from Nvidia, the GeForce GTX 580, it's around 10 per cent more expensive for 20 per cent extra performance. If you're after a card that will play the most punishing games available at the very highest detail levels, this is the one to get.

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