MSI Radeon HD 7970 Lightning Overclocked to 1800MHz, Memory Runs at 7.70GHz

MSI’s Lightning video cards have always been great overclockers, and the newly introduced Radeon HD 7970 Lightning seems to be no exception to this rule, as the card recently managed to reach an impressive 1800MHz GPU and 7.7GHz memory overclock.

The graphics card achieved this 89% core overclock by being cooled with liquid nitrogen and was put through a run of 3DMark 11.

With the overclocked graphics core and the 3GB of GDDR5 memory working at 1925MHz (from the regular 1.375GHz) Elmor, the Swedish overclocker behind this feat, managed to reach a score of P15035, reports TechPowerUp.

This is truly impressive for a single-GPU video card as it greatly surpasses the previous 3DMark 11 world record established by Nvidia’s GTX 580, which stood at P13144.

Besides the MSI-built Radeon HD 7970 Lightning graphics card, the rest of the system used in the overclocking attempt comprised an Intel Core i7-3960X Sandy Bridge-E processor clocked at 5,207MHz, and an MSI Big Bang XPower II motherboard.

The AMD Radeon HD 7970 is AMD’s most powerful single-GPU graphics card to date and was officially introduced at the end of December 2011.

At its heart there stands the Tahiti XT GPU that is based on the company’s new Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture and 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.

All the hardware logic that AMD had to cram into this GPU, makes Tahiti XT the most advanced graphics core ever built, since it features no less than 4.31 billion transistors packed inside a 365mm2 die made using TSMC’s 28nm High-K process.

The current single-GPU 3DMark 11 world record is held by an Asus DirectCU II Radeon HD 7970, which scored P15063 in this benchmark.