HIS 7970 X GHz Edition Review

Overview

 

Today I will be taking a look at the HIS 7970 X GHz Edition, this will be the first HIS product that I have tested (all others so far have earned Gold awards!) and it’s also the first AMD based Graphics Card that I have tested too…

The GHz Edition of AMD’s Tahiti GPU is the same as found in the standard 7970 with a couple of basic exceptions. The first is that the clock speed of the new GHz Edition has been upped and is now 75MHz higher than a basic 7970 (925MHz), this has been achieved solely through chip binning (the GPU is identical!). In addition to this there’s AMD’s Power Tune technology with Boost allowing the card to Turbo up to 1050MHz (not dissimilar to the Boost Clock found on Nvidia Kepler cards such as the MSI GTX 680 TWIN FROZR (OC Edition)).

The HIS 7970 X GHz Edition features a Core Clock of 1000MHz with a Boost of 1050MHz while the memory is clocked at 1500MHz (6 GHz effective). It features 3GB of GDDR5 memory and supports PCIE Express 3.0 (and is also backward compatible). The card also has the ability to drive up to 6 displays via its outputs (x4 DisplayPort, x1 HDMI, x1 DVI).

 

 

The HIS 7970 X GHz Edition came in a smart black box with various features highlighted on both the front and the back. The front of the box highlights the inclusion of a free game, Dirt Showdown and also the inclusion of an Active Mini DisplayPort to Single-Link DVI Eyefinity Adapter, among other things. The left side of the box unusually lists the System Requirements for the card and of particular interest is the call for a 500W+ power supply!

The back of the box highlights many features of the card itself including the 1400+ awards that HIS has won from major media worldwide and also the following:

• More Voltage, More Overclocking The extra PWM phase for core voltage provides extra power stability, lower temperature for power components! Increased Power supplu output for more voltage for overclocking!

• Eyefinity 6 & Eyefinity 5 HIS 7970 X is the card that offers 4 Eyefinity selections! The card is equipped with 4 Mini Displayports and 1 DL-DVI or SL-DVI plus HDMI at your convenience.

• Show and Tell – GPU Voltage Indicator (3 colors) The card is equipped with GPU voltage indicator, making it convenient for you to adjust the voltage for overclocking!

• Fan Speed Indicator (5 colors) The card LED includes the special LED Fan Speed indicator. Gamers could see the actual fan speed represented by different colors!

• Overheat Indicator The card gives a warning signal to gamers, ensuring safety to the full extent. The single color LED indicator will turn on when the card’s temperature is abnormal, avoiding Critical Temperature Failure!

• IceQ X2 Cooling Technology With IceQ X2, the card is cooler and quieter than the reference cooler (17 degrees cooler & 28db quieter).

• iTurbo iTurbo is your software assistant to control your graphics card to be quiet, cool and experience overclocking by simply pressing the iTurbo button!

 

 

Within the box lies a single black inner box with an HIS logo; on opening the inner box you can see that the 7970 X GHz Edition was extremely well packaged with soft foam, which is always good to see. You also get to see that rather smart HIS IceQ X2 cooler for the first time.

 

 

Beneath the card itself is an additional tray, remove this and you will find a weight lifter (more on this later), a CrossFire Bridge, DisplayPort to DVI adapter, DVI-I to VGA adapter, Weight Lifter instructions, Dirt Showdown Offer, iTurbo CD and HIS Wallet.

 

 

Within the wallet you will find the HIS install CD, Multi-Language Quick Installation Guide and a HIS Power Up label.

At the time of this review the HIS 7970 X GHz Edition is retailing for approximately £460 and comes with a 2 year warranty.

 

Specifications/Features

courtesy of HIS

* Additional details available here

 

First Impressions

 

First impressions of the HIS 7970 X GHz Edition are good, in particular that cooler is work of art, it’s certainly one of the nicest looking coolers that I have seen in a while. The reason for this is down to the simple elegance of the whole thing; No crazy colours, no silly shapes just a cool (sorry!) looking cooler. I’m sure the images don’t really do it justice…

 

 

The cooler itself features x2 8.9cm dual axial fans, with x3 6mm heatpipes and a further x2 8mm heatpipes.

The cooler (inc shroud) is very large as you can see, at approximately 297mm long, certainly in comparison to my usual test card (MSI GTX 680 TWIN FROZR (OC Edition)) (256mm in length) it looks huge, so it’s definitely worth checking it fits in your case before buying.

 

 

Looking at the side of the card you can see 3 of the 5 heatpipes and the size of the underlying heatsink, this stretches all the way to the back of the card (and even beyond the PCB) in an attempt to soak up as much of the heat as possible. Obviously all of this metal adds to the weight of the card, weighing in at a whopping 951grams, that’s 162grams more than the MSI GTX 680. What you can’t see here (image below left) is that right where the 3 heatpipes meet there’s a large LED indicator. This is in fact the Fan Speed Indicator that cycles through (Green, Light Blue, Dark Blue, Purple & Red) in order to give you some idea of the fan speed, which I think is a really nice touch as it effectively allows you to keep an eye on the card’s temperature.

At the far end of the card are the 2 power connectors both 8 pin, which is also nice to see as you don’t end up with odd cable ends flapping around inside your case.

 

 

As you can see the card features a blue PCB, although I would have preferred this to be black, as this allows it to match any colour rig build that you may have (guess it’s OK if your rig’s blue!). There’s not much to talk about when it comes to the back of the card, but I have highlighted (see image below) 2 features that are of interest. The first (highlighted red ) is where you will find the card’s indicator LEDS. There are 3 Voltage Indicator LEDS (Yellow, Green, Red) and a single Red (I guess, as my card never overheated!) Overheat Indicator LED. Also highlighted (yellow) in the image below is that fact that you can clearly see that there’s some quality control going on here, always good to see…

On the opposite side of the card you can again see more of the heatpipes on display.

 

 

One of the major attractions and selling points of the HIS 7970 X GHz Edition must surely be the fact that it can drive up to 6 displays at the same time! As you can see from the outputs on the back plate the card features x4 DisplayPort outputs, x1 DVI and x1 HDMI. What’s really interesting (see why later) is what’s that strange button for, a BIOS reset/switch maybe, nope…

Looking at the far end of the card gives you a chance to see how big that heatsink is, big enough for you?

 

 

Hardware Installation

 

Hardware installation was predictably a straightforward affair and despite the card’s length it fitted fine within my test Corsair Vengeance C70 case.

 

 

That was until I installed Windows and the AMD Graphics Drivers, I was then confronted with a problem; according to the AMD Catalyst software my Dell U2711 (2560×1440) monitor now had a recommended (Maximum) resolution of 1920×1080, WTF!? Unfortunately Windows also confirmed this as did looking at the System Info…

Time passed, a lot of time passed…

After re-installing Windows, re-installing the Drivers and even re-installing the card (oh and I rang Dell, their support was excellent (thanks Nelson), but they also couldn’t help (they even suggested that they would send a new monitor!), I was about to give up, but then…

I remembered that button on the back of the card, now although I thought that this was a BIOS reset type switch , I thought what the hell, and pressed it. Guess what happened, Nothing, still a maximum resolution of 1920×1080. As a last ditch attempt I went for a re-boot. Voila, 2560×1440 was back, the button press had fixed it…

After doing some research, meaning I read the back of the box (embarrassed? yes!), I discovered that this switch actually switches the modes of the various outputs on the back of the card, obvious now! And, if the button is down the maximum resolution of the DVI port is 1920×180, but when the button is up 2560×1440! It would have helped if there was something in the box about this, even the CD only contains a duplicate PDF of the Installation Guide, that only shows you how to install a Graphics Card!

 

 

What’s also a little perplexing is this Weight Lifter thing, now I can see why you may use it. But I’m a little unclear as to when you use one, as the images in the instructions suggest that it should be used when the machine is transported! Now this makes perfect sense as the idea is to lend some support to the back of the card, it does weigh 951grams after all…

 

 

Now here comes the rub, it doesn’t fit! Why? Well it’s just not tall enough, in fact it’s short by 40mm in the case (haha) of the Corsair Vengeance C70. Overall I’m really not sure what I think about this rather strange device, good idea maybe, but not fully realised perhaps and definitely too short…

 

 

Testing Methodology/Setup

 

As My Test Rig needed to be swapped from and Nvidia GPU setup to an AMD one, my rig was treated to a fresh install of Windows Home Premium 64Bit (Service Pack 1) with all associated drivers also installed. The latest version of the AMD Catalyst Control Center was used (version 12.8).

 

 

The HIS iTurbo software was used to help with overclocking, version 1.2.1 was downloaded and installed, it can be found here.

 

 

The HIS iTurbo software consists of 5 main screens:

• Home Here you can keep track of HIS related news as well as update to the latest AMD Drivers, along with links to HIS Social Media
• Info The second screen provides an array of information regarding the selected Graphics Card, with the ability to save the info to a file
• Overclock The main overclocking screen, with control over Core/Mem speeds as well as Power and Voltages, 5 Profiles are supported
• FanControl This screen allows you to switch between Automatic, Fixed and Custom with 2 Profiles supported (Cooler & Quieter)
• Settings Here you can modify various HIS GPU settings

 

Overclocking the HIS 7970 X GHz Edition

 

Overclocking the 7070 X GHz Edition was all rather too easy (but then I guess I shouldn’t really complain about that!). This was due to the fact that I just continued adjusting sliders within the Overclock section of the iTurbo software increasing both Core Clock and Memory frequencies until something went wrong! At 1200MHz Core and 1650Mhz Memory, there was no more to be had from the card. Of course this is not to be sniffed at as we are already looking a 14 % overclock on the core (a 20% overclock from a stock GHz Edition 7970) and a 10% increase on the memory.

The odd thing was that when I hit a brick wall at around 1200MHz on the Core no matter what additional Voltage I added it made no difference at all!? The same was true of the memory overclock, adding additional voltage yielded no better results!

Although, as you can see from the benchmarks below the additional overclocks really brought the HIS 7970 X GHz Edition to life, it also managed all of this while remaining at or below a cool 65 degrees Celsius.

 

Benchmarks Used:

Games Played:

• Blacklight Retribution
• Borderlands 2
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat
• Metro 2033

 

Hardware Performance

 

HIS 7970 X GHz Edition Stock Settings (Core: 1000MHz / Boost: 1050MHz / Mem: 6000MHz )

Benchmark	Ambient Temperature	Max GPU Temp	Delta Temp	Result
3DMark 11	22.50	62.00	39.50	9232
Unigine Heaven	22.00	63.00	41.00	1205
Metro 2033	22.50	64.00	41.50	38.67 FPS

 

HIS 7970 X GHz Edition Overclocked Settings (Core: 1000MHz / Boost: 1200MHz / Mem: 6400MHz )

Benchmark	Ambient Temperature	Max GPU Temp	Delta Temp	Result
3DMark 11	21.50	64.00	42.50	10095
Unigine Heaven	21.50	64.00	42.50	1352
Metro 2033	21.50	65.00	43.50	42.00 FPS

 

HIS 7970 X GHz Edition – vs – MSI GTX 680 TWIN FROZR (OC Edition)

* All of the data used here is with the cards at their highest stable overclocks…

Graphics Card	3DMark 11	Unigine Heaven	Metro 2033
HIS 7970 X GHz Edition	10095	1352	42.00 FPS
MSI GTX 680 TWIN FROZR (OC Edition)	10726	1335	34.67 FPS

 

As you can see from the benchmark scores the HIS 7970 X GHz Edition beats the GTX 680 in two of the three benchmarks, these two benchmarks (Unigine Heaven & Metro 2033) are also the most real world benchmarks from a Gaming point of view.

The HIS 7970 dominates in the Metro 2033 test, this is helped by the fact that the 7970 has 3GB of VRAM as opposed the the GTX 680 that only has 2GB. The Unigine test is very close indeed and the HIS 7970 X GHz Edition needs all of its overclocked horsepower to beat the GTX 680. For some reason the 7970 doesn’t fair well in the 3DMark 11 test, this is likely due to the lower resolution of the test used (1280×720).

Overall a good showing from the HIS 7970 X GHz Edition, I think it’s safe to say that it might not be the fastest single GPU on the planet (as some seem to claim) but it’s certainly close enough…

As far as thermals and noise were concerned the HIS 7970 X GHz Edition was excellent with the IceQ X2 cooler really showing its worth. Temperatures remained at 65 degrees or less during all the benchmark runs and the card remained relatively quite at all times. The fans only ramped up to the second stage (Light Blue) as shown by the on-board Fan Speed Indicator (see First Impression for more info).

I can’t help but think that the card should/could have put in a slightly higher overclock as the cooler seems to be so capable; it’s a shame that the card didn’t overclock a little more, but maybe I’m just being greedy…

 

• Eyefinty Support

Of course the big deal with the HIS 7970 X GHz Edition is the support for up to six displays (yes that’s six!), unfortunately I couldn’t lay my hands on 6 monitors, but I did get hold a triple set of IIyama Prolite E2273HDS 22″ 1920×1080 monitors for testing. Unfortunately these monitors were really not up to scratch (although at approx £125 each, I guess one shouldn’t expect too much!) and when each monitor was put side by side the colour variation between each screen was significant (this can even be seen in the images below).

 

 

The good news is that once the appropriate leads were sourced (x1 DVI, x1 DisplayPort to DVI (using adapter supplied) and x1 HDMI) everything from the HIS card and Eyefinty point of view worked like a dream. Through the Catalyst software I was able to configure my screens and set a group resolution of 5760×1080, nice!

Now the fun really starts, because not all games support these resolutions and some require some form of manual (dare I say hacking) to get this to work. This is a shame as it takes the Shine of what is an impressive and immersive experience, of all of the Games tested (Borderlands, Metro 2033, Blacklight Retribution, S.T.A.L.K.E.R Call of Pripyat), the one that worked the best was S.T.A.L.K.E.R.!

 

 

The one thing that I would say having had a look at this card and Eyefinity is that I would personally always opt for a large High Resolution monitor before I pushed on to an Eyefinity setup. This is mainly due to the fact that not many games truly support it and others require hacks and workarounds. Although as I already game and test with a Dell U2711, I’m now thinking of another two, this will give me the best of both world me thinks!

Also driving 3 displays also requires more horsepower and although the HIS 7970 X GHz Edition has as much horsepower as any card out there, you’re likely to see the framerate drop into the twenties while Gaming when using HD resolutions and high levels of AA, although you can always tweak your settings in attempt to get the best playable experience…

 

Final Thoughts

 

So how has the first AMD 7970 card on test here at pcGameware performed then? Well the HIS 7970 X GHz Edition has really put on an impressive showing and it’s clear that the green team don’t really own the fastest Single GPU crown any longer, but then neither do AMD! That’s a good thing, as what we have here are a couple of cards that can exchange blows right at the very top of the performance chart.

So what we need to look at is what does the HIS 7970 X Ghz Edition bring to the party above and beyond an overclocked GTX 680 for example?

Well let’s start at the beginning; the card came really well packaged with soft foam and the bundle included a free game (Dirt Showdown) and also a DisplayPort to DVI adapter too. The included Weight Lifter device (see First Impressions) is a bit of an oddity and in my case (Corsair Vengeance C70) it was not usable as it was too short. The card itself is a really smart affair, with the cooler looking particularly cool (haha!), if a little on the long side at 297mm. The addition of the LED indicators (Fan Speed, Voltage & Overheat) is also welcome, with the Fan Speed indicator being the most useful.

Then of course we have the performance which out of the box at stock speeds (Core: 1050Mhz / Mem: 6000MHz) is very good, overclocked further to (Core: 1200MHz / Mem: 6400MHz) the card really begins to shine and during the review gave my existing test card (MSI GTX 680 TWIN FROZR (OC Edition)) a good run for its money, beating it in two of the three benchmarks. Although I do feel that as the IceQ X2 cooler is so good, I felt that the card could have overclocked further still; it was a shame that at around 1200MHz the card just refused to play anymore, even though the temps were still low at around 65 degrees. Even adding more voltage couldn’t help eek out any more performance.

The main trump card (other than the 3GB of VRAM) for the HIS 7970 X GHz Edition is the fact that it can control up to six displays, now if that floats your boat then this £460 card should probably be at the top of your list. If on the other hand you’re not likely to want to drive more than three screens, then the HIS 7970 X GHx Edition looks a little pricey, especially when compared to other Factory Overclocked 7970s…

 

Verdict