Asus couldn’t have been missing from the Radeon HD 7970 launch party, so the Taiwanese hardware maker has recently unveiled its own Tahiti XT creation targeting performance enthusiasts and gamers everywhere.
Asus’ graphics card doesn’t seem to differ in any way from AMD’s reference design for the HD 7970, which was to be expected as graphics chip makers usually force their partners to adopt this design in the first few months after a new high-end GPU is released.
Despite this,
Asus did however opt to bundle the card with its own GPU Tweak software that allows users to change the voltage fed to the Tahiti XT GPU in order to increase the overclocking potential of the card.
Speaking of the Tahiti XT core, this is based on AMD’s new Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, that replaces the previous VLIW4 design and was built for the ground up to increase GPU computing performance.
In the case of the
HD 7970, this core includes 32 Compute Units for a total of 2048 stream processors that are joined by 128 texture units, 32 ROP units and a 384-bit wide memory bus.
This is linked to 3GB of GDDR5 video buffer memory which runs at 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective), while the stock GPU frequency is set at 925MHz.
Asus has chosen not to surpass these values in its own Radeon HD 7970 solution, so users who require faster than stock performance have to overclock the card on their own or opt for the
XFX Black Edition HD 7970, which is so far the only such card to come factory overclocked.
As far as pricing is concerned, Newegg has the Asus card listed for
$589.99 (464 EUR) which makes it $40 more expansive than AMD’s $549.99 (433 EUR) recommended price for the HD 7970.
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