Are you buying a HD 7970 on Monday the 9th?

[blackened23]

It's interesting to me to see how many 6950/6970 users are now spending over $550 for a single card, I wonder why they don't have a 580 which was out before the slower 6970 appeared.

As bunny said, it's just not fast enough. It would be slower than what I have, and I push my cards to the brink in many games. The 780 probably won't be either, because I'm spoiled now by low cost higher performance multi gpu setups.

You can easily offset the cost by staying with the top of the line parts and selling them as new generations become available. I did this with GTX 285, 5870, 6970, and may possibly do this with GTX 580s as well (not sure -- may throw them in a 2nd PC)

You also lose very little of your initial investment. Used GTX 580s still sell for a TON on ebay. What I would dread is staying a generation or two behind and then having to splunk down 1000$ at once for a crossfire/SLI setup. As it is now, I can get 7970 crossfire for very little money -- MSI lightnings sell extremely well. (though again, I may well keep them in a 2nd PC. I like them very much)

 

[BallaTheFeared]

I was thinking that, I've done it with other parts before and I'll do it with my i5-2500k to i5-3550k.

I dunno, I pieced my stuff together one part at a time. I'd be hard pressed to get the ladies in my life to accept such a large investment. I'd need two 7970s otherwise I'd be stepping backwards, release prices may very well exceed $550 so we're possibly talking $1200 or more.

I paid $150 for each of my cards, and $79 or something for each block, if I was lucky and sold them on ebay for $225-$250 ea including the blocks I'd still be looking at over a $700 investment.

Ugh, I won't lie I'd love more power even at 1080p though

 

[3DVagabond]

It's interesting to me to see how many 6950/6970 users are now spending over $550 for a single card, I wonder why they don't have a 580 which was out before the slower 6970 appeared.

As bunny said, it's just not fast enough. It would be slower than what I have, and I push my cards to the brink in many games. The 780 probably won't be either, because I'm spoiled now by low cost higher performance multi gpu setups.

I don't think we'll see a lot of single 6950 owners take the plunge. That's a perf/$ card which the 7970 is definitely not. I'm sure there are 6970 owners though who didn't buy it because of price point. I could see Eyefinity/high res monitor users opting for it though.

I think when "pushed to the max" (O/C'd under water) the 7970 could end up faster than your SLI 470's. Not by a whole lot though and, unless you'd prefer the performance from a single card, not a very good investment. If I had your setup, I'd stay put as well. Assuming it was playing my games fine.

 

[MrK6]

It's interesting to me to see how many 6950/6970 users are now spending over $550 for a single card, I wonder why they don't have a 580 which was out before the slower 6970 appeared.

As bunny said, it's just not fast enough. It would be slower than what I have, and I push my cards to the brink in many games. The 780 probably won't be either, because I'm spoiled now by low cost higher performance multi gpu setups.

I can't speak for everyone, but for me it's a price/performance issue and a performance/watt issue, and in both cases the GTX 580 falls flat on its face. I got my 6950 for $230 last February. Even when GTX 580's have gone on sale for as low as ~$420, I didn't bite. The reason is my 6950 overclocked is just as fast (or faster) than a GTX 580, and consumes less power, for half the cost. Why would I waste money on a GTX 580? For the chance to overclock it and maybe gain another 20%? That's a waste of money. Fast forward to now, with the 7970 for $50 more I'll be getting a guaranteed 25% boost at stock, and hopefully 60%+ once overclocking kicks in.

 

[Don Karnage]

I bought 3 Mcw82s from MC this afternoon so ill be on water from day 1

 

[MrK6]

I bought 3 Mcw82s from MC this afternoon so ill be on water from day 1

Very nice! That's what I'll be using too; they look like great blocks.

 

[Don Karnage]

Very nice! That's what I'll be using too; they look like great blocks.

Used the MCW60 on my 480 at launch at it ran at 900 core, 1.182v and loaded at 60C. Swiftech makes great products

 

[Panopticon]

I bought 3 Mcw82s from MC this afternoon so ill be on water from day 1

Wow so you really are going to order 3 at launch I thought it was sarcasm. Gonna be beastly :thumbsup:

 

[Don Karnage]

Wow so you really are going to order 3 at launch I thought it was sarcasm. Gonna be beastly :thumbsup:

It all depends on what becomes available. My number 1 choice is An Asus Reference model. If i can get 3 of them i'll be set but i just know newegg is going to impose some stupid 2 per person rule.

 

[badb0y]

Good news boys, MSI afterburner with beta support for 7970 voltage tweaking is here. Previously the only way to alter voltage was in the BIOS.


http://downloads.guru3d.com/MSI-Afterburner-2.2.0-Beta-10-download-2839.html

let the 7970 overclocking madness (with voltage tweaking) begin

MADNESS??? MADNESS??? THIS IS ANANDTECH!!!!!!

Sorry I had to do it

 

[Panopticon]

Meh I bet you can score 3 between newegg and another etailer. I'm sure TD will have some but I've been boycotting them for the last 5 years or so for their sketchy rebate schemes and horrific CS. I wonder if microcenter will have any on launch day... I might have to call tomorrow, the only microcenter close to me is in a rough part of town and I doubt anyone will be lining up for 7970's.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

I can't speak for everyone, but for me it's a price/performance issue and a performance/watt issue, and in both cases the GTX 580 falls flat on its face. I got my 6950 for $230 last February. Even when GTX 580's have gone on sale for as low as ~$420, I didn't bite. The reason is my 6950 overclocked is just as fast (or faster) than a GTX 580, and consumes less power, for half the cost. Why would I waste money on a GTX 580? For the chance to overclock it and maybe gain another 20%? That's a waste of money. Fast forward to now, with the 7970 for $50 more I'll be getting a guaranteed 25% boost at stock, and hopefully 60%+ once overclocking kicks in.

Yeah I understand, I can overclock my cards beyond stock 580 SLI performance, so we're on the same page there. Power draw of 6 series went up considerably with voltage and clocks if I remember right though, so the power draw difference may not have been as drastic as you thought.

Currently you can get 580s (and I wouldn't get them due to the price/performance aspect and my current resolution) for $450~ that's before (or even if) Nvidia drops the price to respond (they may not have to, at least not much). Assuming some markup on the $550 MSRP it's going to be closer to a $150 or more price difference.

Which brings me to my biggest problem with the 7970, for me at least. The performance per watt is really nice, even the increase over stock 6970s was pretty decent. However knowing how this stuff works, I'm aware that this is just the first step into improved performance per watt. I know that AMD is price gouging hard because they're doing very poorly as a company. I also know AMD took a hit on their performance this gen because of the GCN redesign, but even so they saw a 40-60% increase at times over the 6970. Which leads me to believe Nvidia should see as good if not better performance increases over the 580. Also it leads me to believe Nvidia is going to show decent improvements in their power vs performance area, the 580 was faster than the 6970 and consumed ~75 more watts at full load, while the 570 was much closer only drawing ~25 more watts. If Nvidia gets the same performance gain (and they should actually get more over the 580 than the 7970 got over the 6970) while retaining something close to what AMD got for power/performance it's going push the 7970 down into the upper $300 price range.

Huge block, sorry. However since Nvidia doesn't want to talk about "when" it could be this Q, or next, or next year for all we know, but we should all be aware the 780 is going to trounce this card.

What I'm trying to say is this card is poorly priced, unless you absolutely have to upgrade, and do it now, and can only do so with this one card it makes very little sense to get it now instead of waiting it out.

 

[x3sphere]

It's interesting to me to see how many 6950/6970 users are now spending over $550 for a single card, I wonder why they don't have a 580 which was out before the slower 6970 appeared.

As bunny said, it's just not fast enough. It would be slower than what I have, and I push my cards to the brink in many games. The 780 probably won't be either, because I'm spoiled now by low cost higher performance multi gpu setups.

I never considered the 580 as it only had 1.5GB VRAM. And the 3GB version was a poor value price/perf wise -- most variants still cost as much or more than the HD7970... I game at 2560x1600 with lots of AA, so avoiding any VRAM bottleneck is crucial. The 2GB 6970 was simply a way better value.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

I never considered the 580 as it only had 1.5GB VRAM. And the 3GB version was a poor value price/perf wise -- most variants still cost as much or more than the HD7970... I game at 2560x1600 with lots of AA, so avoiding any VRAM bottleneck is crucial. The 2GB 6970 was simply a way better value.

Understandable, within an already small market you make up a very small fraction of it with the triple monitor people. Not saying it's the best choice, or anything like that ()

 

[blackened23]

Understandable, within an already small market you make up a very small fraction of it with the triple monitor people. Not saying it's the best choice, or anything like that ()

The MSRP for a 1.5gb 580 is 489.99, while the 3gb version is 589.99. You're comparing an overclocked card to a stock one and also comparing a 1.5gb card to a 3gb one.

 

[MrK6]

Which brings me to my biggest problem with the 7970, for me at least. The performance per watt is really nice, even the increase over stock 6970s was pretty decent. However knowing how this stuff works, I'm aware that this is just the first step into improved performance per watt. I know that AMD is price gouging hard because they're doing very poorly as a company. I also know AMD took a hit on their performance this gen because of the GCN redesign, but even so they saw a 40-60% increase at times over the 6970. Which leads me to believe Nvidia should see as good if not better performance increases over the 580. Also it leads me to believe Nvidia is going to show decent improvements in their power vs performance area, the 580 was faster than the 6970 and consumed ~75 more watts at full load, while the 570 was much closer only drawing ~25 more watts. If Nvidia gets the same performance gain (and they should actually get more over the 580 than the 7970 got over the 6970) while retaining something close to what AMD got for power/performance it's going push the 7970 down into the upper $300 price range.

I agree that the 7970 isn't a tremendous leap over the 6970 and that AMD probably had some setbacks in switching gears to GCN (which I will point out they executed extremely well anyway). However, I think you're being overly optimistic about Kepler. First off, it looks good on paper, but being a new architecture, we'll have little idea how it translates to real world performance. Looking at GK104 will probably shed some light on its big brother, but this is all still months away. That brings us to my second point, with the extra 3-6 months that Kepler is getting, I would hope it would be substantially faster than the 7970. NVIDIA can't release another GTX 480 that's only 10-15% faster, falls way behind in every other metric, and is 6 months late. This brings me to my third point, Fermi. Remember how optimistic all the news releases were and how NVIDIA kept going on and on about how awesome Fermi would be, yada yada yada? Well, look how that turned out. You can also couple in little tidbits like the fact that NVIDIA is already pushing the thermal envelope much higher than AMD and has less wiggle room.

Huge block, sorry. However since Nvidia doesn't want to talk about "when" it could be this Q, or next, or next year for all we know, but we should all be aware the 780 is going to trounce this card.

Never be sorry for writing a complete, logical, and well presented opinion :thumbsup: However, my point still stands that betting anything on the 680 is useless until we get some reputable leaks. Again, I reference Fermi.

What I'm trying to say is this card is poorly priced, unless you absolutely have to upgrade, and do it now, and can only do so with this one card it makes very little sense to get it now instead of waiting it out.

I agree that there will be more 28nm cards that will give the 7970 a run for its money and its price will undoubtedly decrease as the market builds up and becomes more competitive. But that's months away and we have no idea how it will eventually level out. People said the same thing about the 5870/5850 and Fermi and look how that turned out. I bought my 6950 2GB for $230 11 months ago and they're now going for $250. If you buy a good card, it's a good investment, and I think the 7970 is a good card.

 

[blackened23]

This is another reason why i'm a proponent of always purchasing next gen GPUs on day 1. If you sell your old stuff on ebay, you lose very little of your initial investment! If kepler somehow magically were released 3 months from now, I would absolutely buy it on day 1

Then you never have to agonize with upgrading. I like new shiny stuff! I've made some stupid upgrades though, I actually upgraded a P8z68 pro motherboard to a p8z68 pro gen3. Hmm, yeah. Not the smartest thing.

 

[Don Karnage]

Meh I bet you can score 3 between newegg and another etailer. I'm sure TD will have some but I've been boycotting them for the last 5 years or so for their sketchy rebate schemes and horrific CS. I wonder if microcenter will have any on launch day... I might have to call tomorrow, the only microcenter close to me is in a rough part of town and I doubt anyone will be lining up for 7970's.

No TD for me. I refuse to waste money with them. If i can only get 2 i'll probably just wait a week for a third

 

[BallaTheFeared]

The MSRP for a 1.5gb 580 is 489.99, while the 3gb version is 589.99. You're comparing an overclocked card to a stock one and also comparing a 1.5gb card to a 3gb one.

No I'm not saying the 7970 isn't faster, I'm saying the 580 was priced there because it was faster for the majority of users and there was really no answer from AMD for it. It came out in 2010, Nov I believe. That's over one year for a $500 card, my point was more towards the fact that unless Nvidia falls flat on it's face, both in performance and release dates the 7970 isn't going to hold that price point nearly as long. If you paid $500 for a 580 back on release you had almost 1 1/2 years and a release from AMD where your card was still top, I dare say the same will not be said for the 7970.

MrK6 I enjoy my cards, though probably mostly because they were dirt cheap. 607 MHz factory clocks was pretty sad, the big difference between the 58xx/69xx and the 470/480 was the overclock difference (and power draw ), which is why so many people are excited about the 7970, it overclocks well. I know this feeling because I can run a 50% overclock in SLI daily. My poor performing, power sucking, dirt cheap 4 series cards are pretty fast :wub:

All that said it's pretty clear to me now I'm assuming too many things. I'm assuming Nvidia will have their 28nm cards out sooner rather than later, and I'm assuming performance increases that have no merit except it's what I've personally come to expect from Nvidia. They don't always hit their marks, but they always go 110%, that little arrogant man they call a CEO makes it so.

 

[bryanW1995]

i5 2500K @ 4GHz.

And I was getting that higher FPS with the 840/1325 clocks [versus stock 800/1250] when the CPU was running at 3.7GHz.

What are the before and after avg fps? You have a flaw somewhere in your methodology unless you were already at 140 fps.

 

[BrightCandle]

Being an Eyefinity user I have been nothing but disappointed with the 5970. I have buckets full of microstutter and issues with resolution scaling with the small amounts of DRAM available on board. The 6990 was never much of an upgrade and suffers the same crossfire issues without bringing much performance even if it did fix the DRAM problem in a lot of games.

So its with a heavy heart that I have to get at least one 7970. That should genuinely increase performance to the point where eyefinity is possible in almost all games, especially if I get two of them. When crossfire doesn't work (often) at least it should run fine on a 1920x1200 until the custom profile comes out or I work out how to make it run with crossfire using AMD's profile support in 12.1.

I don't like the price, I don't think the performance boost is right for the price and after the mess of AMD's drivers of late I am not expecting it to work on launch day. But AMD got to 22nm first and its the fastest single core card out there, and I for one am never relying on crossfire to give me playable performance ever again, dual cores are a bad idea when you sacrifice non crossfire performance.

I hate you AMD, please have my money.

 

[Grooveriding]

Being an Eyefinity user I have been nothing but disappointed with the 5970. I have buckets full of microstutter and issues with resolution scaling with the small amounts of DRAM available on board. The 6990 was never much of an upgrade and suffers the same crossfire issues without bringing much performance even if it did fix the DRAM problem in a lot of games.

So its with a heavy heart that I have to get at least one 7970. That should genuinely increase performance to the point where eyefinity is possible in almost all games, especially if I get two of them. When crossfire doesn't work (often) at least it should run fine on a 1920x1200 until the custom profile comes out or I work out how to make it run with crossfire using AMD's profile support in 12.1.

I don't like the price, I don't think the performance boost is right for the price and after the mess of AMD's drivers of late I am not expecting it to work on launch day. But AMD got to 22nm first and its the fastest single core card out there, and I for one am never relying on crossfire to give me playable performance ever again, dual cores are a bad idea when you sacrifice non crossfire performance.

I hate you AMD, please have my money.

Well you're going to find the 7970 quite a bit better than. FWIW the 5970 was always hamstrung by 1GB VRAM and the 5XXX series crossfire scaling was never ideal. Since then with the 6 and now 7 series crossfire scaling is vastly improved.

 

[Lonbjerg]

Well you're going to find the 7970 quite a bit better than. FWIW the 5970 was always hamstrung by 1GB VRAM and the 5XXX series crossfire scaling was never ideal. Since then with the 6 and now 7 series crossfire scaling is vastly improved.

But microstutter is still there.
A shame more sites don't use techport's method to measuring microstutter...microstutter is a killer for me and excludes multi-GPU.

 

[boxleitnerb]

Use a fps limiter. Additionally, at 50+ fps there is (almost) no microstutter anymore (at least with SLI).

 

[Lonbjerg]

Use a fps limiter. Additionally, at 50+ fps there is (almost) no microstutter anymore (at least with SLI).

Did you use your eyes...or did you actually measure it?

You know...like this:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/21516