AMD HD 7970 GHz Edition launched

AMD launched the Radeon HD 7970 Ghz Edition today. Basically just a rebrand of the Radeon HD 7970, that was introduced on January 10, the new cards run at 1 GHz core clock with a boost up to 1.05 GHz, and a memory clock of 1.5 GHz (6 GHz effective). AMD say this is the fastest single-GPU card on the market today.

The basic specs, other than clock speeds, are the same as for the original HD 7970, which means they probably use the same PCB (good news for customers who use 3rd party coolers), which is no big surprise. The rebrand was made possible by improved yields with more high performing die at lower voltages.

As for being the fastest card in the world - on the overclocking and benchmarking website hwbot.org, 94 of the fastest 100 single GPUs benchmarked running 3DMark 11 are Radeon HD 7970 cards, although the fastest overclocked card is an NVidia GTX 680. This should be good news for AMD as it backs up their claims of it being the fastest card available, although those numbers do not indicate how the card performs when run at stock speeds.

The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition will be available next week, with prices starting at $499 for a reference design card.