Hi guys, just got my new graphics card this week and I thought I would shear some results with you. As the title says I will be testing an AMD 7970 Lightning. This card is relatively new so I haven’t had a chance to get the card to its full potential because of driver limitation but as you will see the card can still deliver some good numbers.
First Look
So let’s take a look at the card
The standard box for a lightning card. Looks good and shows that this card has 17 phase PWM power and triple overvoltage.
As we open the box you get you first look at the card. So let’s take a closer look at what’s in the box.
In the box you just get the standard connectors and cables. As you can see there is a mini display port to DVI, Mini display port to HDMI a crossfire bridge and two 4pin PCI Express pins to 6pin adaptors.
First look at the card. You can see it is a bit wider that a standard GPU. That’s because of the custom MSI PCB this card uses. This is also the first card to feature MSI Twin Frozr 4 design. This offers better cooling with its 10cm fans and super pipe technology.
The back of the card is covered by a back plate to help with cooling. This card is also the first card to have MSI’s GPU Reactor technology built in to it. This allows for higher current to be passed through the card allowing for a more stable overclock.
Testing
Test System
I will be running all the test on my main RIG. The specs are
· Corsair 500r
· Corsair AX850w
· Corsair H100
· Corsair Vengeance Blur 8GB
· 2x Corsair Force 3 120gb RAID0
· Western Digital Green 1TB
· MSI Z68A-GD65-G3
· Intel i7 2600K @ 4.2Ghz
· MSI 7970 Lightning
http://forum.overclo...4-new-2012-rig/
All tests will be rant at maximum setting @ 1920x1080
I’m going to putt the card through its paces on several games such as Crysis and Metro 2033. I will be running these tests at stock clock and then with a slight overclock.
As you can see the lightning comes with a factory overclock of 1070 on the core and 1400 on the memory. This is already a significant overclock of 145Mhz on the core and just 25Mhz on the memory.
Crysis
The first game I will be testing is crisis. This game is getting on a bit now and might seem a bit irrelevant, but Crysis is a good benchmark for your GPU because if you can run Crysis well you’re probably going to be good with other games.
These are the settings I will be using for Crysis. As you can see the game has been maxed out. I will only be running in 32bit since MSI afterburner does not work in 64bit. So let’s take a look at the results.
As you can see from the results Crysis ran at a awesome average frame rate of 65. This is an amazing frame rate for Crysis and should give an amazing gaming experience. You can see the card never dropped below 30FPS which is quite an achievement.
Crysis 2
Now let’s take a look at Crysis 2. This game is known for better frame rates compared to Crysis 1 but still need a good RIG to achieve the high frame rates. I will be using Adrenaline Crysis 2 Benchmark to benchmark Crysis 2.
I will be running the benchmark on three different maps. The maps are Time Square, Downtown and Central Park. All three maps will be ran through three time to get a average result.
The Crysis 2 benchmark shows a verity of results depending on the map.
The first map Time Square shows the highest average FPS of 74.
The second map Downtown shows a slightly lower result of 66. Still a good average score and very playable.
With the third map we take the biggest FPS hit, coming out with 60. Still a solid score.
Metro 2033
Now let’s see which we can get with Metro. Metro is a hard game to get playable frame rate with all the settings set to very high.
As you can see the game is completely maxed out. I ran the benchmark with 10 loops to get a average frame rate.
With the ten loops completed we see we have a quite a nice average frame rate of 35 dead with a maximum frame rate of 78.47 and a minimum frame rate of 6.7.
If you have ever run the metro benchmark you know that they middle section of the bench is extremely hard on you system. Even with a card as good as the 7970 lightning the frame rates drop of below 10 for a second or two. This happened with my old card and I have even seen it happen with a 590 and 6990.
Still a very good frame rate for a notorious hard game.
Unigine Heaven
For my last test I will be using Heaven. This is a good all round test for DX11 card since it will push any card to the maximum of it potential. I will be running two different tests on Heaven. The first one will be Heaven just opened and run, the second test will be Heaven completely maxed out with tessellation set to extreme.
Lest start with the open and run test.
With the pre-set benchmark complete we end up with a score of 2952 with a maximum frame rate of 210.9 and a minimum frame rate of 51.6. The average frame rate is a very nice 117.2. I don’t know if this is any good or not so you guys will have to tell me. Now let see what we come out when we run Unigine at max.
With Heaven maxed out we get a score of 1222 with a max frame rate of 120.1 and a minimum frame rate of 22.7. We still get an impressive average of 48.5.
Overclocking
Overclocking the 7970 lightning is a lot of fun since you have plenty of options for voltages and clock speeds. As I have said at the beginning of this review the card comes with a factory overclock of 1070 on the core and 1400 on the memory. So let’s see what I can push it up to without voltage tweaks.
After messing around with the card for an hour or so I got a stable clock out of the card that I found significant.
As you can see I managed to get a OC of 1130MHz on the core and a massive 1600MHz on the memory. This is a nice overclock of 60MHz more on the core and 200MHz on the memory, now let’s see what the OC has done to the cards performances.
We will start with Crysis. I will use all the same setting as I did before. Everything maxed out with 10 loops to get an average FPS.
With the overclock applied we see a nice boost with Crysis of just 5FPS give or take. While this isn’t a massive improvement it’s a step in the right direction.
Now let’s the results of Metro when overclocked.
The FPS gain in metro is smaller than that of Crysis but still a higher average FPS of 38.50. This is a 3 FPS jump over the stock clocks but the max FPS jumped over 70 frames with the min frame rate staying around the same.
For the last OC test I’m going to be using Unigine again.
With the card OC we see a slight improvement from the stock results. The card achieves just under 100 more points coming out with 1316 and gets a nice average frame rate of 52.2. The max frame rate jumps over 10 more FPS and the min drops over 1 FPS but in other tests I have seen it over 25 FPS.
Temps
The temps of the card are amazing. Been playing games and overclocking it for 5 days now and haven’t seen the card go above 65c maxed out and it idles around 30c. This amazing cooling performance is down to the twin frozr 4 cooler on this card. The card never get noisy and I have never seen the fans spin up above 60%.
Conclusion
All in all I think this is a excellent card. Maybe not worth the £470 price tag but still a excellent card. If you guys want me to test any more game with the card just ask and I will see what I can do. I maybe updating this post this weekend or next week to shear my OC results when I up the volts.
Thanks for reading and any feedback is welcome.
First Look
So let’s take a look at the card
The standard box for a lightning card. Looks good and shows that this card has 17 phase PWM power and triple overvoltage.
As we open the box you get you first look at the card. So let’s take a closer look at what’s in the box.
In the box you just get the standard connectors and cables. As you can see there is a mini display port to DVI, Mini display port to HDMI a crossfire bridge and two 4pin PCI Express pins to 6pin adaptors.
First look at the card. You can see it is a bit wider that a standard GPU. That’s because of the custom MSI PCB this card uses. This is also the first card to feature MSI Twin Frozr 4 design. This offers better cooling with its 10cm fans and super pipe technology.
The back of the card is covered by a back plate to help with cooling. This card is also the first card to have MSI’s GPU Reactor technology built in to it. This allows for higher current to be passed through the card allowing for a more stable overclock.
Testing
Test System
I will be running all the test on my main RIG. The specs are
· Corsair 500r
· Corsair AX850w
· Corsair H100
· Corsair Vengeance Blur 8GB
· 2x Corsair Force 3 120gb RAID0
· Western Digital Green 1TB
· MSI Z68A-GD65-G3
· Intel i7 2600K @ 4.2Ghz
· MSI 7970 Lightning
http://forum.overclo...4-new-2012-rig/
All tests will be rant at maximum setting @ 1920x1080
I’m going to putt the card through its paces on several games such as Crysis and Metro 2033. I will be running these tests at stock clock and then with a slight overclock.
As you can see the lightning comes with a factory overclock of 1070 on the core and 1400 on the memory. This is already a significant overclock of 145Mhz on the core and just 25Mhz on the memory.
Crysis
The first game I will be testing is crisis. This game is getting on a bit now and might seem a bit irrelevant, but Crysis is a good benchmark for your GPU because if you can run Crysis well you’re probably going to be good with other games.
These are the settings I will be using for Crysis. As you can see the game has been maxed out. I will only be running in 32bit since MSI afterburner does not work in 64bit. So let’s take a look at the results.
As you can see from the results Crysis ran at a awesome average frame rate of 65. This is an amazing frame rate for Crysis and should give an amazing gaming experience. You can see the card never dropped below 30FPS which is quite an achievement.
Crysis 2
Now let’s take a look at Crysis 2. This game is known for better frame rates compared to Crysis 1 but still need a good RIG to achieve the high frame rates. I will be using Adrenaline Crysis 2 Benchmark to benchmark Crysis 2.
I will be running the benchmark on three different maps. The maps are Time Square, Downtown and Central Park. All three maps will be ran through three time to get a average result.
The Crysis 2 benchmark shows a verity of results depending on the map.
The first map Time Square shows the highest average FPS of 74.
The second map Downtown shows a slightly lower result of 66. Still a good average score and very playable.
With the third map we take the biggest FPS hit, coming out with 60. Still a solid score.
Metro 2033
Now let’s see which we can get with Metro. Metro is a hard game to get playable frame rate with all the settings set to very high.
As you can see the game is completely maxed out. I ran the benchmark with 10 loops to get a average frame rate.
With the ten loops completed we see we have a quite a nice average frame rate of 35 dead with a maximum frame rate of 78.47 and a minimum frame rate of 6.7.
If you have ever run the metro benchmark you know that they middle section of the bench is extremely hard on you system. Even with a card as good as the 7970 lightning the frame rates drop of below 10 for a second or two. This happened with my old card and I have even seen it happen with a 590 and 6990.
Still a very good frame rate for a notorious hard game.
Unigine Heaven
For my last test I will be using Heaven. This is a good all round test for DX11 card since it will push any card to the maximum of it potential. I will be running two different tests on Heaven. The first one will be Heaven just opened and run, the second test will be Heaven completely maxed out with tessellation set to extreme.
Lest start with the open and run test.
With the pre-set benchmark complete we end up with a score of 2952 with a maximum frame rate of 210.9 and a minimum frame rate of 51.6. The average frame rate is a very nice 117.2. I don’t know if this is any good or not so you guys will have to tell me. Now let see what we come out when we run Unigine at max.
With Heaven maxed out we get a score of 1222 with a max frame rate of 120.1 and a minimum frame rate of 22.7. We still get an impressive average of 48.5.
Overclocking
Overclocking the 7970 lightning is a lot of fun since you have plenty of options for voltages and clock speeds. As I have said at the beginning of this review the card comes with a factory overclock of 1070 on the core and 1400 on the memory. So let’s see what I can push it up to without voltage tweaks.
After messing around with the card for an hour or so I got a stable clock out of the card that I found significant.
As you can see I managed to get a OC of 1130MHz on the core and a massive 1600MHz on the memory. This is a nice overclock of 60MHz more on the core and 200MHz on the memory, now let’s see what the OC has done to the cards performances.
We will start with Crysis. I will use all the same setting as I did before. Everything maxed out with 10 loops to get an average FPS.
With the overclock applied we see a nice boost with Crysis of just 5FPS give or take. While this isn’t a massive improvement it’s a step in the right direction.
Now let’s the results of Metro when overclocked.
The FPS gain in metro is smaller than that of Crysis but still a higher average FPS of 38.50. This is a 3 FPS jump over the stock clocks but the max FPS jumped over 70 frames with the min frame rate staying around the same.
For the last OC test I’m going to be using Unigine again.
With the card OC we see a slight improvement from the stock results. The card achieves just under 100 more points coming out with 1316 and gets a nice average frame rate of 52.2. The max frame rate jumps over 10 more FPS and the min drops over 1 FPS but in other tests I have seen it over 25 FPS.
Temps
The temps of the card are amazing. Been playing games and overclocking it for 5 days now and haven’t seen the card go above 65c maxed out and it idles around 30c. This amazing cooling performance is down to the twin frozr 4 cooler on this card. The card never get noisy and I have never seen the fans spin up above 60%.
Conclusion
All in all I think this is a excellent card. Maybe not worth the £470 price tag but still a excellent card. If you guys want me to test any more game with the card just ask and I will see what I can do. I maybe updating this post this weekend or next week to shear my OC results when I up the volts.
Thanks for reading and any feedback is welcome.
