1GHz Overclocked Radeon HD 7970 Announced by XFX

XFX is the first company to announce a custom designed version of the AMD Radeon HD 7970, which will be launched in the company’s Black Edition line and will arrive sporting a 1GHz overclocked Tahiti XT GPU.

The card is based on a XFX proprietary design and includes two large fans (presumably 92mm) for dissipating the heat produced by the card while running.

Thanks to this advanced cooling setup, XFX was able to push AMD’s graphics card over its reference frequencies and clocked the GPU at an impressive 1GHz while the memory is now working at 1425MHz (5.7Gbps data rate).

To put things in perspective, AMD’s recommended operating frequencies for the Radeon HD 7970 are set at 925MHz and 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective), respectively.

AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 is based on the Tahiti XT core, which 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 and the GPU is manufactured using the 28nm fabrication process which enables the Radeon HD 7970 to be one of the coolest and most energy efficient high-end graphics card around.

Performance wise, tests have shown that the stock HD 7970 is on average 15-25% faster than Nvidia's GTX 580, this difference growing at high resolutions, but thanks to its increased operating clocks, XFX’ solution should be even faster.

Right now, XFX hasn’t said when the Black Edition FX-797A-TDBC Radeon HD 7970 will actually arrive in stores, but Newegg has already listed the card on its website.

Pricing was established at $599.99 (about 472 EUR), which makes it significantly more expensive than other HD 7970’s based on AMD’s reference design, but the extra speed may be worth it for some.

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