Legit News
HD 7970 GHz Edition Cards Prompt Price Reductions of Vanilla Versions
AMD's paper launch of the faster HD 7970 GHz Edition on June 21 has unsurprisingly prompted price cuts of the vanilla non-GHz cards. The HD 7970 GHz Edition will sell for $499, the HD 7970 is reduced from $449 to $429, the HD 7950 down from $399 to $349 and the HD 7870 GHz Edition is down from $349 to $299.
According to AMD, the prices will be effective from July 16, when the HD 7970 GHz Edition is expected to be generally available. AMD claim that their upcoming 12.7 Catalyst graphics driver will give the entire 7000 series a "significant performance bump" too, which will be interesting to see. The HD 7970 GHz Edition is faster than NVIDIA's flagship GTX 680, but not in all benchmarks - please see our review for full details. We await NVIDIA's response to this enhanced HD 7970.
Finally, it appears that when AMD initially released the HD 7970 six months ago, they kept some performance in reserve, to allow for such an increased performance card in order to compete better with NVIDIA in the tit-for-tat performance game that they're locked into. It looks like the only difference between a regular card and the GHz Edition is a modified video BIOS. Legit Reviews is proud to host this vBIOS file for download and our news article about this BIOS explaining its enhanced features along with a download link are here.
Posted by | Fri, Jul 13, 2012 - 07:40 PM
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