HIS Radeon HD 7970 3GB X Turbo - Overclocking

As MSI has only given their HD 7850 1GB a small overclock, we were keen to see what more the card could do, so took to MSI's own Afterburner tool to stretch the card to its limits. Once we'd settled on a stable overclock, we re-ran the Battlefield 3 1,920 x 1,080 test as well as the Unigine Heaven 3.0 benchmark to gauge the impact of it.

Despite voltage adjustments not being possible with this card in Afterburner, we were still able to run the card at the program's core clock limit of 1,050MHz without problem, which is the same 22 per cent overclock we were able to achieve with the HD 7850 2GB. We were also able to increase the memory clock by 9 per cent to 1.31GHz (5.24GHz effective), before the card started to show artefacts. At these settings, the card increased our system's total power consumption under GPU load to 189W.



Read our performance analysis on the next page.