I think the 7970 will really show it's true (28 nm) colours once the enthusiasts are able to get over the 1125 MHz CCC clocking limit.

So far almost all the reviewers (that I've read, I haven't read them all) who have OC'd the card with Catalyst have been able to push it to that limit without voltage changes; this suggests that the card has a fair bit of headroom to explore...

Cool! If the TIM is applied correctly at least, it should be a screamer!

I'll hold on to my 5870's for a bit longer. Still, a good improvement for AMD. I'm not willing to lay down the cash when for my needs it won't gain me as much per dollar. Now, if someone wants to buy my 5870's off of me, we can talk.

Yeah I was hoping the 7970 was going to be another huge milestone leap card like the 8800GT and the 5870 were for their times, in those current reviews it seems more like the iterative 10-20% increase over the competition as most of the last few years of releases have been from both companies...

However overclocking is a good point, maybe if it can be highly overclocked or newer drivers bring out the performance (as the last few have done for the 5870), then indeed there could be a higher increase over the 580 GTX yet to be had.

they tested them using pre-release drivers

I compare AMD/ATI to AMD/ATI first.

Thing is, the 28nm HD7970 was supposed to be released a year ago and replace the 40nm HD5870. However, it was delayed because TSMC couldn't get their 28nm production line working. The 40nm HD6970 was a "stopgap" product. To add to the confusion, had the 28nm HD7970 been released last year it would have been called HD6970 (or HD6870).

Running at 1GHz, the HD7970 is about as good as my two HD5870 in crossfire. So, one HD7970 does the work of two of the cards it was supposed to replace. That's a generational improvement. It also does a lot of other things well (e.g. physics, compute, tessellation) and already supports DX11.1 and Windows 8. Its a high performing one card solution for 3 monitor gaming -- a big improvement over GTX580 in that regard.

I think for multi-monitor set ups AMD is a clear winner with this card; but for those of us running a single monitor on a relatively recent GPU I'm not sure there's any compelling reason to upgrade to the 7970... I think it's price will drop pretty fast once nvidia releases it's Kepler cards...

I agree

Guys do not forget nVidia is finally responding: http://www.tweaktown.com/news/21936/leak..._580/index.html

But still no release date????

Interesting and impressive numbers. Will nVidia do Surround gaming on a single card though?