Overclocking

AMD had advised us that the HD 7970 3GB had a whole lot of extra performance in the tank for board partners to tap into with pre-overclocked versions, and it wasn't joking. We fired up MSI Afterburner and immediately pushed the clocks as high as they would go. This resulted in a GPU frequency of 1125MHz - an incredible 20 per cent increase, and a memory frequency of 1,575MHz (6.3GHz effective) - a 14 per cent increase.

What’s more impressive is that this overclock was accomplished with no overvolting and without adjusting the card’s PowerTune state, indicating that there’s even more performance within this GPU for those with more exotic cooling equipment.

While we may have been fortunate with the quality of our GPU, this is a huge overclock, surpassing even the prowess of the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1GB; a card we’ve always ranked as one of the best overclockers available. In Battlefield 3 at 2,560 x 1,600 with 4x AA we saw a minimum frame rate of 39fps - 6fps higher than the HD 7970 2GB’s stock performance and just 1fps lower than the mighty dual-GPU Radeon HD 6990 4GB!



Read our performance analysis.