AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition: Taking Back the Crown 132
An anonymous reader writes "The benchmarks are in for the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. Starting at $500, AMD's new single-GPU flagship boosts the original 7970's clock speed from 925 MHz to 1 GHz (1050 MHz with Boost). The GHz Edition also sports 3 GB of faster 1500 MHz GDDR5 memory, pushing 288 GB/s as opposed to 264 GB/s. While the AMD reference board runs hot and loud, retail boards will use different cooling solutions. A simple test of aftermarket GPU coolers shows that any other option will shave degrees and slash decibels. But it's the Catalyst 12.7 beta driver that really steals the show for AMD, pushing FPS scores into overdrive. With the new Catalyst, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 670 can no longer beat the original Radeon HD 7970, and the GHz Edition outmaneuvers the GeForce GTX 680 in most cases. However, when factoring price and possible overclocking into the equation, the original Radeon HD 7970 and GeForce GTX 670 remain the high-end graphics cards to beat."
AMD Linux support sucks (Score:5, Informative)
Regardless Torvalds recently getting his feathers ruffled with Nvidia.... In most cases Nvidia just works on Linux. I swore off AMD/ATI loooong back because JUST about time they finally get a decent proprietary linux driver support for one of their chipsets, it drops off the back side of support. I DESPISE forced upgrades and won't get caught in that trap again. All of our perfectly working AMD video laptops still work great but no proprietary driver support and the open source driver is waaaay worse. Nvidia proprietary drivers still support VERY old chipsets.
Re:I'm done with spendy, top of the line cards (Score:5, Informative)
Ditto! I kept buying top end Nvidia cards for CUDA work, only to have them die just after the warranty, usually a year or so. I dug out an old Nvidia Quadro 285 card from the early 2000's, and am using it again. Also the 8400gs I got works just peacy for simple CUDA stuff.
It is like they engineer their top end cards to fail after a year or so, no matter what. My GTX 280 never went beyond 50 degrees, and was underclocked to boot (I didn't need all the power). Yet it died after a year or so, about as long as the 8800GTX I had beforehand.
The Quadro has been in use in some form for more than half a decade, and it still does 99% of what I need (Apart from the CUDA stuff, otherwise it would be perfect). Their older stuff seems more solid.
Re:AMD Linux support sucks (Score:5, Informative)
+1 I had an ATI in my last Linux desktop. Never again.
The proprietary fglrx drivers tend to have weird bugs and as you say, they drop chips that are old enough to have decent support. On the flip-side, the open-source radeon drivers tend to require various bleeding edge bits and pieces to work correctly, so they are nearly impossible to run on stable distros, like an Ubuntu LTS or a RHEL.
Nividia's proprietary drivers just work, once you finally figure out how to blacklist nouveau hard enough that it doesn't get loaded via the initrd. Plus they support VDPAU for projects like MythTV and XBMC.
Re:I'm done with spendy, top of the line cards (Score:4, Informative)
this is the detailed article explaining why the things are the way they are : http://www.geeks3d.com/20100504/tutorial-graphics-cards-voltage-regulator-modules-vrm-explained/2/ [geeks3d.com]
Re:I'm done with spendy, top of the line cards (Score:4, Informative)
I forgot to add to read that one after reading the page I linked : http://www.geeks3d.com/20091209/geforce-gtx-275-vrm-damaged-by-furmark/ [geeks3d.com]