PowerColor HD7970 Overclocking & Eyefinity Review

Test Setup

For those of you who have skipped straight to our Eyefinity review, firstly you’re very naughty and have missed some important information in the first review, and secondly you’ll notice that as it’s 2012 we’ve upgraded our test rig to a LGA2011 Core i7-3960X. Which gives a decent improvement scores over the i7-950 set up we previously used.

PowerColor HD7970
Catalyst HD7970 Drivers 11.12
Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4GHz
ASUS Rampage IV Extreme
Corsair AX1200W
Corsair GTX8
Corsair H100
3x iiyama Prolite 24″
Windows 7 Ultimate x64

Overclocking

To say that the HD7970 overclocks easily is akin to saying that British weather has a habit of raining. Open the Catalyst Control Centre, slide the GPU Core slider to the stops, apply. It’s really that simple. The only thing to note is the bug in GPUz which shows the newly overclocked speed as the default clock, which it isn’t.

 

Temperatures

Considering that this is the bog-standard reference cooler, and AMD aren’t known for their excellent coolers, it’s good that even when overclocked and under a hefty load the temperature doesn’t go above 77°C. You have a little noise to put up with, but certainly better than the reference HD6 series cards.