VTX3D Radeon HD7970 X Edition Review

1. Introduction2. VTX3D Radeon HD7970 X Edition3. VTX3D Radeon HD7970 X Edition (Super High Res Gallery)4. Testing Methodology5. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark6. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage7. Synthetic: 3DMark 118. Synthetic: HQV Benchmark 2.09. Gaming: F1 201110. Gaming: Homefront11. Gaming: Alien V Predator12. Gaming: Dead Island13. Gaming: Tom Clancy HAWX 214. Gaming: Resident Evil 515. Gaming: Far Cry 216. Gaming: Total War Shogun 217. Technical: Acoustics Performance18. Technical: Thermal Dynamics19. Technical: Power Consumption20. Technical: Overclocking21. Closing Thoughts22. View All Pages

We reviewed the reference AMD HD7970 flagship card in December last year and we were suitably impressed. A few weeks later XFX sent us their XFX R7970 Double Dissipation graphics card which featured a custom cooling solution. Today we look at the latest version of the card from partner VTX3D – The ‘HD7970 X Edition' is the first HD7970 we have reviewed which features not only a modified cooler, but overclocked core clock and memory speeds. Is this good enough to get the Kitguru seal of approval?

It would be fair to say that VTX3D are a little known player in the graphics sector, although they are trying hard to raise their profile with the enthusiast gamer. They are a division of Tul Corporation, who also manage the more widely known PowerColor series of hardware.

VTX3D are a subsection of Tul Corporation who focus on achieving the lowest possible price points. For instance, their last generation dual GPU HD6990 was priced at £515 inc vat on Amazon, when others were £599 inc vat.

VTX3D know they have a lot to prove in the enthusiast sector, so are they any good when it comes to batting head to head against the big boys, such as Sapphire and XFX ?

The X Edition card we are reviewing today certainly ticks all the right boxes on paper. It ships with a custom cooler, dual fans and significant out of the box clock speeds.

Product	VTX3D X Edition AMD HD7970	AMD HD7950	AMD HD7870	AMD HD7850
Core Clock speed	925mhz (1050mhz)	800mhz	1000mhz	860mhz
Transistors	4.31 billion	4.31 billion	2.8 billion	2.8 billion
Stream Processors	2,048	1,792	1,280	1,024
Compute Performance	3.79 TFLOPS	2.87 TFLOPS	2.56 TFLOPS	1.76 TFLOPS
Texture Units	128	112	80	64
Texture Fillrate	118.4 GT/s	89.6 GT/s	80 GT/s	55.0 GT/s
ROPs	32	32	32	32
Pixel Fillrate	29.6 GP/s	25.6 GP/s	32.0 GP/s	27.52 GP/s
Z/Stencil	128	128	128	128
Memory Type	3GB GDDR5	3GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5
Memory Clock	1,375mhz (1,425mhz)	1,250mhz	1,200mhz	1,200mhz
Memory Data Rate	5.5 GBps (5.7Gbps)	5.0 Gbps	4.8 Gbps	4.8 Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	264 GB/s	240 GB/s	153.6 GB/s	153.6 GB/s

Above, we can see how the VTX3D Radeon HD7970 X Edition slots into the marketplace (clock speeds marked in bold). The core clock speed is increased from 925mhz to a whopping 1,050mhz out of the box, and the 3GB of GDDR5 memory receives a tweak from 1,375 mhz (5.5 Gbps) to 1,425 mhz (5.7Gbps).

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