HD7970 from ASUS and XFX, who offers the most impressive card?

Subject: Graphics Cards | January 26, 2012 - 05:12 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: xfx, GCN, asus, southern islands, radeon, pcie 3.0, dx 11.1, amd, 7970, 28nm

[H]ard|OCP recently came out with two HD7970 reviews, one made by ASUS and one by XFX. The ASUS Radeon HD 7970 is currently one of the least expensive choices at $559 and runs at the default speeds of 925MHz and 1375MHz. It does ship with ASUS' GPU Tweak utility to allow for easy overclocking if you wish to push the card like [H] did, in their case to 1125MHz on the GPU core, and 1695MHz GDDR5.

The other choice is the XFX R7970 Black Edition which is a custom card, overclocked to 1GHz on the core and 1425MHz GDDR5 but costs $50 more than the offering from ASUS. At the out of the box speeds, XFX's card both draws less energy and runs much cooler and was silent compared to the ASUS offering. Even after [H] overclocked the card to 1125MHz core and 1575MHz GDDR5, which was the maximum possible using AMD's Overdrive, it was almost silent when running full out.

The decision seems to be how much it is worth to you to have a quiet card and if you are willing to find a way to overclock beyond what the Catalyst Control Center can manage.

"We have the new XFX R7970 Black Edition video card to evaluate, which is XFX's current flagship Radeon HD 7970 based video card. With a custom PCB, custom hardware components and custom cooling fan, will it take us to new heights in overclocking, or leave us wishing we had just purchased a "reference" card?"

Here are some more Graphics Card articles from around the web:

Graphics Cards

Source: [H]ard|OCP

XFX Radeon HD 7970 3GB Black Edition and CrossFire Results

Author: Ryan Shrout

Date: January 8, 2012

Subject: Graphics Cards

Manufacturer: XFX

Tagged: xfx, HD 7970, crossfire, black edition, 7970

Retail-ready HD 7970

We first showed off the power of the new AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB graphics card in our reference review posted on December 22nd. If you haven't read all about the new Southern Islands architecture and the Tahiti chip that powers the HD 7970 then you should already be clicking the link above to my review to get up to speed. Once you have done so, please return here to continue.

...

Welcome back, oh wise one. Now we are ready to proceed. By now you already know that the Radeon HD 7970 is the fastest GPU on the planet, besting the NVIDIA GTX 580 by a solid 20-30% in most cases. For our first retail card review we are going to be looking at the XFX Black Edition Double Dissipation that overclocks the GPU and memory clocks slightly and offers a new cooler that promises to be more efficient and quieter.

Let's put XFX to the test!

The XFX Radeon HD 7970 3GB Black Edition Double Dissipation

Because of the use of a completely custom cooler, the XFX HD 7970 Black Edition Double Dissipation looks completely different than the reference model we tested last month though the feature set remains identical. The silver and black motif works well here.

Continue reading our review of the XFX Radeon HD 7970 3GB Black Edition Double Dissipation!!

A best of three HD 6950 battle royal

Subject: Graphics Cards | October 26, 2011 - 05:36 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: hd 6950, amd, gigabyte, msi, xfx, factory overclocked

Heading to The Tech Report will bring you to a round up of HD6950's including Gigabyte's GV-R695OC-1GD, the MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III 1G/OC and the XFX HD-695X-ZDDC. The GPU clocks range from 830MHz to 870MHz and RAM ranging from the stock 1250MHz to 1350MHz, with the MSI and XFX offering their own overclocking tools and Gigabyte relying on the Catalyst Control Center for further overclocking. MSI's offering came out looking very good, with the best performance and the best power efficiency and thanks to a mail in rebate it picks up the best ratings in the round up. It is a close race though with the cards performing very similarly, as you can see in the review.

"We've gathered three souped-up Radeon HD 6950 graphics cards from Gigabyte, MSI, and XFX. Which one delivers the most bang for your buck?"

Here are some more Graphics Card articles from around the web:

Graphics Cards

Source: The Tech Report

Announcing the XFX PSU Contest

Subject: General Tech | June 8, 2011 - 12:32 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: xfx, PSU, easy rail, contest

XFX is giving away 10 PSUs, one each day, to a lucky winner who has registered for their giveaway. Each day they zero out the applications so you must re-enter the contest every day, though only one entry per day will count. Winners will get an email and have 24 hours to respond otherwise XFX will pick a new winner. You can also read more about XFX 's PSUs on this page in case you aren't convinced that getting one for free is a good enough reason to try them out.

Click here to enter ... every day until the Monday the 13th!

Official Rules

Contest Period: June 6-10, 2011 and June 13-17, 2011.
Everyone that registers from 12:01 AM to 12:00 PM on the contest period above will be drawn each day for a daily prize.
Please register only once a day. Duplicate entry on the same day will be taken out to give everyone equal winning chance.
Winners will be chosen in a daily drawing. If you don’t win today, you can register again tomorrow for a chance to win tomorrow’s prize.
Winners will be contacted via email. You have to reply back to us within 24 hours of the time of receiving the notification to be able to win the prize. If 24 hours are past, we will contact the next eligible winner of that day.
Once winners are confirmed, we will announce their name on this contest page. This contest is open to North America residents only
You must be 18 years old and up to be qualified for this contest. You must register with a valid email address and mailing address in order to qualify to win. You are not qualified to enter the contest again if you are already win the prize in this same contest.

Source: XFX

Buy an AMD GPU (or two) and get a free copy of DiRT 3

Subject: General Tech, Graphics Cards | May 24, 2011 - 02:29 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: xfx, sapphire, powercolor, msi, his, free, dirt 3, amd

If you haven't heard of DiRT 3 by now, you've been missing one of the more technically innovative games developed recently. Racing fans will go overboard for the choice of cars, spanning 50 years of racing history, which you can compete with in races across all terrain types and the more artistic will like the freestyle gymkhana events.

The techies will be impressed by the depth of support for DX11 features and we're not just talking about tessellation added on as an afterthought. The game was designed from the ground up to take advantage of the best graphics cards and to move the way light and shadows interact beyond DX10 HDR and the features other new games have been using.

Whichever you are, picking up a new Radeon card from Sapphire, Powercolor, MSI, HIS or XFX nets you a free copy of the game! How can you go wrong with that?

No doubt you’ve heard that the newest addition to Codemasters’ racing games, DiRT 3 has launched today. The reviews are also in, and they’re great, I mean, they’re really great.

Being a Gaming Evolved title, we worked with Codemasters very closely on this one - DiRT 3 makes advances in graphics technologies, taking full advantage of the DirectX™ 11 API, first supported by AMD Radeon graphics. Here’s a glimpse of what DiRT 3 is truly capable of doing – giving players the ultimate visual experience:

Shader Model 5.0 Contact Hardening Shadows

DirectCompute Accelerated High Definition Ambient Occlusion

Optimized Hardware Tessellation

In addition, DiRT 3 has been validated for various Eyefinity configurations, including the brand new 5x1 setup. But the fun doesn’t stop there. You’ll see some examples of it here.

We believe DiRT 3 is such a great game, that we’ve been working with our AIB partners to make this game widely accessible to everyone who buys an AMD Radeon graphics card from our select AIBs, FOR FREE – please visit www.amd.com/dirt3 for more details.

Source: AMD

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