AMD announces next-gen Radeon HD 7970 for $549, says it 'soundly beats' rivals





By Sharif Sakr posted Dec 22nd 2011 12:01AM

A fresh contender for your blow-out 2012 Olympic gaming rig: AMD's first 28nm GPU, the Radeon HD 7970. It's scheduled to arrive on January 9th, priced at $549 -- nearly $200 more than its direct ancestor, the 6970. Then again, this newcomer packs some supremely athletic specs, including a 925MHz engine clock that can be readily OC'd to 1.1GHz, 2,048 stream processors and an uncommonly muscular 384-bit memory bus serving 3GB of GDDR5. At the same time, AMD hopes to make the card more practical than the dual-processor 6990 by bringing the card's power consumption down to less than 300W under load and a mere 3W in 'long idle' mode, and promising quieter cooling thanks to improved airflow and a bigger fan. We'll have to wait for benchmarks in January before we hand out any medals, but in the meantime NVIDIA's forthcoming 28nm Kepler GPU might want to step up its training schedule.

Update: Pre-release reviews are out already and our round-up will follow imminently.
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AMD announces next-gen Radeon HD 7970 for $549, says it 'soundly beats' rivals -- Engadget

AMD has impressive hardware - just not impressive driver support =( - I would go amd if they stepped up there driver support a bit...worked with developers ...everytime a new game comes out I see bitching of amd cards - it happens to nvidia but you can safely say they release drivers waaaay faster than amd.

The price isnt THAT bad for that kind of output so eh - ill wait for the new nvidia =)

I think Nvidia's aiming for a Q2 release on their new GPU's... so I think I'll wait for them too.

Meh, I read a few articles and saw the benchmarks. It defintely doesn't do enough to warrant that price.

Originally Posted by BritPatriot89

I think Nvidia's aiming for a Q2 release on their new GPU's... so I think I'll wait for them too.

Same here. Nvidia always seems to get the upper hand performance-wise in game. That, and as Death said AMD drivers suck peruvian asshole.

And they still have only 1 DVI connector, 1 HDMI, and 2 mini port display. But, will it support 3 screens on one card?