HIS Radeon HD 7970 3GB X Turbo review

Performance Analysis

As you probably suspected, the HD 7970 3GB X Turbo is a damn fast card. In Battlefield 3, the X Turbo improved upon the HD 7970 3GB GHz Edition's minimum frame rate by 6fps at 1,920 x 1,080, taking it above the GeForce GTX 680 2GB by 2fps. In the two higher resolutions, the GHz Edition could only tie with GTX 680 2GB in this game, but the X Turbo improved both scores by 3fps.

The 6fps improvement on the GHz Edition in Crysis 2 at 1,920 x 1,080 took put the X Turbo in top place for this test. The improvements at higher resolutions were smaller, however - it was only able to best the GHz Edition by 3fps at 2,560 x 1,600 and by just a single frame per second at 5,760 x 1,080, which was not enough to catch the GTX 680 2GB.


In Skyrim, the 5fps improvement on the GHz Edition's minimum frame rate of 78fps at 1,920 x 1,080 was enough to surpass the GTX 670 2GB, but it still trailed the GTX 680 2GB's minimum frame rate of 88fps. It did, however, overtake the GTX 680 2GB by 2fps at 2,560 x 1,600, a more likely resolution to be used with a card of this power, and added 4fps to the GHz Edition's minimum frame rate in three screen gaming.

Again in The Witcher 2, the X Turbo's minimum frame rate in the 1080p test was still 2fps behind the GTX 680 2GB, as it could only match the frame rates posted by the standard GHz edition no matter how many times we restarted and re-ran the test. However, it improved on the GHz Edition's minimum frame rates by 3fps in both higher resolution tests, increasing its lead on the GTX 680 2GB.

Previously in our Unigine benchmark, the GTX 680 2GB and HD 7970 3GB GHz Edition had been neck and neck, with just two points between them. The X Turbo, however, was able to surpass the GTX 680 2GB's score of 1,865, achieving a score of 2,034, which is a 9 per cent performance boost. Through overclocking the X Turbo, we managed to squeeze a few extra fps out of it in Battlefield 3 and a 6 per cent increase in its Unigine score before the card finally had no more to give.


It wasn't surprising to see the X Turbo be the most power hungry single GPU we've tested, but despite the increased power draw over the stock GHz Edition, the thermal results of the HIS X Turbo were vastly improved over the standard card. Its delta T of 44°C was a healthy 19 per cent lower than that of the card it's based on, with the HIS IceQ X² obviously doing an excellent job of keeping the card cool. Not only did it run cool, but it was a quiet performer too – even when it was under load and overclocked, the fans, although louder, were still relatively quiet.

Conclusion

There's absolutely no denying that the HIS Radeon HD 7970 3GB X Turbo is a desirable card. It's quite possibly the fastest single GPU card available, and certainly the fastest we've ever seen, as it trumped the GTX 680 2GB in nearly all of our benchmarks. It also features excellent connectivity and a cooling system that strikes a wonderful balance between staying cool and quiet.

However, though it's an improvement on the GHz Edition of the HD 7970 3GB, it's still not one that's worth £80, as the performance increases it offers are marginal at best, and as such it falls short of a recommendation. The GHz Edition can be found for just less than GTX 680 2GB cards at the moment and offers improved performance too. Even buyers who can afford the X Turbo, most likely those who like to game across multiple monitors, would probably be better off buying the standard GHz Edition or a pre-overclocked HD 7970 3GB and putting the money saved toward a decent water-cooling setup.