VTX3D HD7970 PCIE2 vs PCIE3 Review

Test Setup

As it’s the new year we say goodbye to our well-used i7-950 setup and move on to a LGA2011 based system. However this obviously has more cores and much more power so for our first review we’re testing at stock on both systems so that we can directly compare the HD7970 to the other cards we’ve tested, but also see how much of a benefit the very latest hardware can have.

As well as changing our test rig we’ve also adjusted our graphs. Because the maximum framerate is so high it can make the important bits, minimum and average framerate hard to read. So we’ve split them out in to two graphs. This should make it all much clearer to read. We definitely want feedback on this. Maximum framerate is nearly pointless so is it something you’re interested in? Let us know in our forums.

Our old system :

VTX3D HD7970
Catalyst HD7970 Drivers 11.12
Intel Core-i7 950 @ 4GHz
Gigabyte G1 Assassin
Corsair AX1200W
6GB Mushkin Redline
Noctua NH-D14
Windows 7 Ultimate x64

Our new system is built as follows :

VTX3D HD7970
Catalyst HD7970 Drivers 11.12
Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4GHz
ASUS Rampage IV Extreme
Corsair AX1200W
Corsair GTX8
Corsair H100
Windows 7 Ultimate x64

Memory Usage

There have been a few people wondering if the giant amounts of GDDR5 on the latest cards is worthwhile. So we thought we’d just show you how much memory is used by each of the games in our tests. As you can see even the monster textures of the Crysis 2 Hi-Res pack don’t really fill our HD7970 up.