AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Video Card Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

After running all the benchmarks we are left to wonder why AMD didn’t launch the Radeon HD 7970 video card like this in the first place! The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition performed really great and as you saw in the gaming benchmarks it was ahead of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 video card in more benchmarks than not. It wasn’t a clean victory by any means and it just goes to show that AMD and NVIDIA are still pretty darn close to one another. We love the new AMD PowerTune w/ Boost and how both AMD and NVIDIA are now using dynamic clocks to achieve the best gaming performance possible.

Since the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz is basically just a vBIOS change we have a hard time grasping that the company wants consumers to pay an extra $70 or 16% for these features. As we mentioned in the introduction Legit Reviews is hosting the official AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz vBIOS and you should be able to flash a Radeon HD 7970 and get the same performance. Gamers and enthusiasts love overclocking and modding things, so a simple vBIOS flash and saving $70 appears they way to go for us. If you aren’t comfortable with flashing a vBIOS or are worried about a warranty and bricking your card then you are better off paying the $70 and getting the real deal.

AMD announced the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition on June 22nd and the cards are still not available in the retail channel. We have been told that the cards should finally arrive for purchase on July 16th. One of the reasons we held this review is because we had a feeling the vBIOS was coming and we were tipped off that these cards were many weeks away from shipping. Rather than rushing out a review we figured that we’d wait this one out and let things unfold. We are happy we did as the official vBIOS was released, pricing changes happened, and the card still isn’t available to purchase.

Legit Bottom Line: The AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition is a beast and is the overall fastest single-GPU video card on the market today.