Introduction

The other day we looked at the brand new HD 7970 GHz Edition from AMD and something that we thought would be big for this model is the overclocking ability. To offer such a strong clock out of the box AMD would've no doubt had to make sure they have cherry picked GPUs.

What we're hoping is that not only have these GPUs brought with them a stronger stock clock, but also a stronger overclock that helps boost performance even further. So that's exactly what we're going to do today; find out just what kind of overclock we're able to get out of the new HD 7970 GHz Edition.

Of course there's not a whole lot to cover as we're not only dealing with a reference card which has no bundle, but we also looked at the video card the other day. If you're interested in a closer look at the card I recommend that you check out our original launch article we just linked to above.

From here we'll simply move into the overclocking side of things and with the help of MSI Afterburner we'll find out just what kind of MHz we're able to get out of the video card here today. Once we've done that we'll move into the test system side of things and cover the cards that we'll be using in today's graphs before we finally get into the performance side of things and find out just what this new HD 7970 is able to offer us on the overclocking side.

Overclocking

Before we cover what we achieved today, let's just quickly go over the original speeds we saw on the HD 7970 and the ones on the GHz Edition. In December when the HD 7970 launched we had a core clock of 925MHz and the 3GB of GDDR5 came in at 5500MHz QDR. The new GHz Edition that just launched pushed those clocks to 1050MHz and 6000MHz QDR.

Looking above you can see with the help of MSI Afterburner we ended up pushing the core to 1165MHz while the 3GB of GDDR5 came in at 6800MHz QDR.

This compares to the original HD 7970 which found itself sitting around the 1100MHz / 6100MHz QDR mark when overclocked.