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Topic: Hardware

AMD to launch new flagship Radeon HD 7970 desktop graphics card on December 22

Summary: AMD still may not be able to claim the top-performing desktop processor, but it's gunning for the title of fastest graphics card for your PC with its newest board. The Radeon HD 7970 is based on the new 28nm "Tahiti" manufacturing process and sports a brand-new architecture.

Sean Portnoy

By for Laptops & Desktops |

AMD still may not be able to claim the top-performing desktop processor, but it's gunning for the title of fastest graphics card for your PC with its newest board. The Radeon HD 7970 is based on the new 28nm "Tahiti" manufacturing process and sports a brand-new architecture.

Per VR-Zone, the top-tier 7970 will come with 2,048 stream processors and 3GB of GDDR5 memory that will make use of a 384-bit bus width. The core clock speed will be 925MHz, but AMD claims that the card will be able to be overclocked beyond 1GHz. Cooling is provided by a heat sink (sixth-generation vapor chamber!) and "improved fan design" and will occupy one of two expansion slots. No doubt after-market liquid cooling options will be available.

According to Fudzilla, initial reports indicate that the 7970 appears to be about 30 percent faster than its Radeon HD 6970 predecessor, with performance close to the dual-GPU Radeon HD 6990. These numbers come from using the initial driver, so performance should be further tweaked before release.

AMD will supposedly introduce the new card on Thursday December 22, though you won't see it stocked in stores until early January. That will give you more time to save up, because top performance always requires top dollar -- in this case, supposedly $549 for the Radeon HD 7970. We'll know soon if it's worth the coin for hard-core gamers.

Topics: Hardware, Processors

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  • RE: AMD to launch new flagship Radeon HD 7970 desktop graphics card on December 22

    You know, I understand that 'faster is better', but I would really like the game companies to start trying to wring the best performance that they can out of the older graphics cards in older machines.

    Some people, like myself, buy laptops for gaming that the video cards are impossible or extremely difficult to replace and don't want to be upgrading every year.
    Lerianis10
    Reply Vote

    • Yeah and at $549 for graphics acceleration alone...

      @Lerianis10

      only the most gung ho die-hards are going to be upgrading (anything).
      klumper
      Reply Vote

      • RE: AMD to launch new flagship Radeon HD 7970 desktop graphics card on December 22

        @klumper It's par the course for top end graphics cards. Nothing says you have to buy them for a while. It's not like everybody is buying those 1000 dollar Intel CPUs either, but they will come down in price. It's like you want them to just stop making cards. The brand new stuff will always be expensive.
        Aerowind
        Reply Vote

      • RE: AMD to launch new flagship Radeon HD 7970 desktop graphics card on December 22

        @klumper Although... it's hard to resist a sub-200 dollar graphics card that's more computationally powerful than the top-end models of yesteryear.
        luckyducky7@...
        Reply Vote

      • RE: AMD to launch new flagship Radeon HD 7970 desktop graphics card on December 22

        @klumper I consider that cheap now a days. I paid $739CDN for a 4870X2 3 years ago and it only has half the power of this new one.
        bvonr@...
        Reply Vote

    • RE: AMD to launch new flagship Radeon HD 7970 desktop graphics card on December 22

      @Lerianis10 Nothing says you have to play at max graphics. I bought a gaming laptop for around 1000 (and if you pay less, it's not really a laptop for gaming.) about 3 years ago, and it can still run new releases like Skyrim and the like perfectly fine. It only had a midrange card at the time as well. If you really did buy a "gaming" laptop a year ago and it can't play current games, then it probably wasn't fit for gaming in the first place.
      Aerowind
      Reply Vote

      • Gaming Laptops

        @Aerowind
        I really doubt people buy laptops specifically for gaming, do they? You'd wind up tethered to an outlet, and in that case it'd make more sense to get a desktop anyways. At this point, I'm only looking at swapping a few parts until my next build (since I'm waiting for the bulldozers to come down in price before doing a new build), and then I'd only be swapping out the motherboard and cpu... maybe ram (if I haven't gotten that already).
        Drakaran
        Reply Vote
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