Launch of AMD 7000 Series (7970)

Today was the day AMD lifted their NDA on their new cards, specifically the 7970, which went on sale this morning.

As you can see from Aria's web page, it seems stock levels have already dropped to zero!

The acceptable prices seem to vary between around £430 and £520 among most retailers, some sites are selling at over £550. Possible milking of release day prices, I'd hope to see most places drop to below £500 in the not too distant future.

If someone were to ask me if they should buy one, quite frankly I'd say no, as we currently have no idea what nVidia have to offer in their new Kepler cards due to be released in the next few months. If they aren't all that great, you can pick up one of these AMD cards, hopefully prices may have dropped a few pounds then. However, if they are very good cards, I'd be kicking myself if I'd gone for one of these AMD ones now! So my advice is to hold out a short while and see what the green team have to offer.

AMD Deny 7000s GPU with 2304 Cores

From this document I posted earlier, leaked by Sapphire, it appeared as though there were a 2304 core GPU on the cards, however it had been crossed out.

Speculation led people to believe this was the rumoured '7980' card, however the senior PR executive from AMD, Mr. Hook, has denied the claims that there is a 7980 card.
Whether this now means Sapphire are in trouble for leaking (what may have been intentionally false) information or whether they just plain lied is uncertain.

Sandy Bridge E Setup

Having recently bought a new setup I've done a brief write up on the specs and a few benchmarks.

Specs
Cooler Master HAF X
Corsair HX1050W
Gigabyte X79-UD5
Intel i7 3930K & Corsair H100 (Push/Pull with 4x bequiet Shadow Wings)
16GB (4x4GB) Corsair Vengeance 1866Mhz
2x128GB Crucial m4 (RAID0)
1TB Seagate Barracuda (Media)
500GB WD Caviar (Backup & Games that don't fit on RAID)
160GB WD (Documents)
MSI Twin Frozr II GTX 570 (Had a second Gigabyte Windforce 570, was later tested as faulty but took credit note instead as I'm waiting for new cards)
2xSony DVDRW Drives (no need for bluray as I used the TV for that)
2 x 24" HD Iiyama ProLites
Razer Naga Epic
Logitech G510
Logitech X530 5.1 surround system
Plantronics Gamecom 777

Above spec was when it was built, check the side panel on 'My Systems' for the updates to it!

I had a few issues with install which have smoothed themselves out now, something was causing the motherboard to hang on installation of windows and when writing/reading large or multiple files from the RAID array.

I did manage a few benchmarks of the stock system vs the overclocked system though not so fussed on 3DMark scores as the GPU wasn't the main focus of the build.

Peak read of 1010.58 MB/s and write of 413 MB/s

Intel Burn Test @ 70GFlops and an average of 45.3 degrees across cores

Boot Timer ran at 19.6 seconds

PCMark score of 22668

X3 TC @ 109.2fps

I had a quick tinker with the CPU and GPU clock settings and reached 835Mhz core on the GPU at stock voltage and 4.375Ghz on the CPU at 1.3V - I need to re-visit this as the motherboard needs a BIOS update as I'm two behind at the moment.

Intel Burn Test now showing 163.6 GFlops, an increase of almost 95

Average core temperatures were 63.8 degrees

Boot Timer cut by ~4.5 seconds

An increase of 2700 on PCMark, ~12%

X3 showed a large increase at 139.6fps, a 30fps increase

So far I'm fairly impressed with the system, it's very quick to respond, mainly down the RAID array having decreased load times massively. The system itself managed with everything I throw at it, the only downside currently being the GPU, while it's a great card, I'm looking forward to the new nVidia Kepler cards in a few months and comparing them to the current ones available from AMD.

I'll have another play with the overclocking when I get back to the UK and post up an update when I get round to it.

AMD Launching 7000 Series GPUs

So, with the news that AMD are now launching their next generation of GPUs around the 9th January, it seems an appropriate time to write a little on them.

We're currently looking at around £450-£500 retail prices here in the UK based on the speculation we've seen so far. They will be launching their 7970 flagship card first, with the 7950 allegedly coming shortly after.

A few different spec cards can be seen on a 'leaked' Sapphire image HERE, clearly showing variants of the 7970 with clock rates from 925Mhz to 1335Mhz and a decent 3GB of VRAM.

We've got people almost breaking 55K Vantage scores with overclocked cards now HERE and world records being taken already HERE.

These cards should turn out to be quite decent, though perhaps judgement should be reserved for when nVidia's Kepler cards go live? I know that's what I'm waiting on!