Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 SOC Review

Test System Specs & 3Dmark 11

Core i7 Test System Specs

• Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition (3.30GHz)
• x4 2GB G.Skill DDR3-1600(CAS 8-8-8-20)
• Gigabyte G1.Assassin2 (Intel X79)
• OCZ ZX Series (1250w)
• Crucial m4 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s)
• Gainward GeForce GTX 680 Phantom (2048MB)
• Gainward GeForce GTX 670 Phantom (2048MB)
• Gainward GeForce GTX 680 (2048MB)
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 590 (3072MB)
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB)
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 570 (1280MB)
• Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1024MB)
• AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition (3072MB)
• Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 SOC (3072MB)
• HIS Radeon HD 7970 (3072MB)
• HIS Radeon HD 7950 (3072MB)
• HIS Radeon HD 7870 (2048MB)
• HIS Radeon HD 7850 (2048MB)
• HIS Radeon HD 6990 (4096MB)
• HIS Radeon HD 6970 (2048MB)
• HIS Radeon HD 6950 (2048MB)
• HIS Radeon HD 6870 (1024MB)
• Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit
• Nvidia Forceware 301.42
• AMD Catalyst 12.7

According to 3Dmark 11 Pro, the Gigabyte HD 7970 SOC is 17% faster than a standard HD 7970 and 7% faster than the GHz Edition card. Without any voltage modifications, we were able to reach a core clock speed of 1.2GHz resulting in a score of 3362pts, 6% higher than Gigabyte’s factory overclock and 23% faster than the standard 7970.

Eventually, we arrived at a core clock of 1260MHz and 1600MHz for the GDDR5 memory which boosted the 3Dmark score to 3554fps -- 31% faster than the standard 7970 and quicker than both the previous-generation dual-GPU cards.