After our recent review of the ASUS HD 6970 and seeing the lackluster results that we were presented with, we decided to set out and give the 6970 another shot. Was it just another bad driver from AMD that seemed to have crippled the 6970, or was it in fact just the card itself that wasn’t meeting our expectations? So what we have done is take the Catalyst 10.12 driver that we reviewed the card on and put them up against the new 11.1 WHQL and 11.1a Hotfix drivers that were released January 26th. We decided to use some of the benchmarks that were mentioned in the patch notes of the 11.1a drivers to run our tests. Hopefully, in this test we can get a little closer to figuring out if this card was just over hyped on exactly what it could do or if the drivers just neutered it. It should also be noted that this was not written to be a super in-depth look at the driver differences. We merely wanted to look at a few tests that were mentioned and see if we could find differences in the drivers performance, good or bad, and see if it has a chance of curing the 6970′s prior mediocre showing. Read on…
Test System:
- CPU: Intel Core i7 920
- Motherboard: ASUS Rampage III Extreme
- RAM: Mushkin Blackline 3×2GB DDR3
- Video Card: ASUS HD 6970 (Drivers: 11.1a Jan 26 Hotfix, 11.1 WHQL, 10.12 WHQL)
- Power Supply: Antec TPQ 1200W
- Storage: Western Digital black 500GB
Overclocking:
With a slight oversight on our part in the last review, we wanted to come back and clear it up in this follow up. The ASUS HD 6970 can be unlocked passed the 950 core limit when you enable the Overclocking Range Enhancement (above picture) option in the settings menu. Yes, we missed this in our initial review, and we do apologize for this oversight.
With that embarrassment out of the way, we go onto reach a maximum overclock of this card. We ended up with a 9% overclock on the core speed and a 3% overclock on the memory speed. We had an improvement in core speed overclocks, obviously, with the range enhancement option enabled. The memory dropped down 1%, which ended up being 11Mhz and that will not be noticeable at all.
16 Comments
[...] like they didnt even bench them again so how they got a new total is confusing. Check these out http://www.techreaction.net/2011/01/…0-12-compared/ http://www.techreaction.net/2011/02/…2-99-compared/ They are follow ups for new driver releases. [...]
[...] in every game they are exactly the same as the 6970 release numbers. Drivers didnt change anything http://www.techreaction.net/2011/01/…0-12-compared/ . __________________ NVIDIA GeForce GTX 500 Series Owners [...]
@Juraj
He did not run the benchmark on GTA:IV. If he had you may be right. As it stands I believe in Crysis and Metro a faster processor would only excentuate the changes we see by a few frames.
Not all games are CPU bounded, Some are GPU bounded only and the higher res you go the more of the GPU load it takes. this is from Experience that I have learned over the years from being a Reviewer myself. Now I will have to say I am scratching my head at his results myself, but then again not everyone going to get the same results either and his “review” was based on his experiences and his own results. in this case I say he did a hell of a job. there is no way of going bigger unless he starts overclocking, or goes out and buys a Core i7 970/980 CPU that is the only way of doing it. the 1155 CPUs are based off the same architecture as the current 1156/1366 CPU’s the only difference is that they are 32nm. ie. why other reviews I read state if you are on the current 1366 or 1156 (i7) there is no real need to upgrade to a 1155 based CPU. And if you are currently using a 1366 CPU you be essentially going backwards because You lose the triple channel memory capabilities also the full 16x/16x PCI-E lanes. what part do you not fully understand.
@Dragon
A stock i920 is much more limiting factor than 6970 at 16×10 and lower resolutions.
Higher resolutions would benefit from a faster CPU as well.
It’s very simple. If you want to test GPU you need to use the fastest CPU you can get in order to shift bottlenecks to the tested GPU.
@The Duke
A feedback to you. I hope you take it and learn from it.
Because of the above mentioned reasons I do not consider your tests that much valuable.
SInce I cvan not edit the post, I will add just because the 1366′s are a bit older then the current set up, they are still very much a viable platform and the preferred platform for multiple vid’s and thats been stated over numerous reviews.
Okies cool now it makes a bit more sense to me
maybe put that in your set up portion.
@Jural, the only thing making the newer 1155′s doing so well is that they are all on a 32nm process vs the core i7 920-960 on the 45nm. Also not to mention the 1156/1155′s both came out after the core i7 1366 been out and Intel was able to optimize them a bit more.
The 920 is left at stock throughout the testing.
@all
Have a look here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/20
If you got your i920 to at least 3.33GHz.
Just a dumb question what was your speed on the CPU? because 5k is awfully low. My 5870 Eyefinity Edition barely pulled 4800 on a 4.3 GHz 930 and that was overclocked, the 6970 is pulling 6053 on 3dmark11. While using 1.11a drivers.
@Juraj, I agree with everyone else how is the Core i7 920 out of date? the 1155 CPU’s may be able to take the 920-960 CPU’s on all out frequency but these 1366 CPU’s still support full X16/X16 PCI-E lanes and still maintain’s the highest memory bandwidth. AMD manages to do well, but the 1366 is still vastly superior (Talking Quad core to Quad core, Hex core to Hex core.)
Interesting results, I expected the 11.1a drivers to run better on the 6970 as there were supposed to be tweaks specifically for the 6970/50 that were inundated from the 11.1 WHQL release.
@Juraj I don’t understand. Is it not up to date simply because it is 1366? The performance is higher than anything currently released on the AMD front. 1156 has lower performance chips than the 920 and 1155 is being recalled due to chipset errors. If 1366 is not up to date (and I am going to assume you mean in performance) then what should be used?
@ Juraj:
How is a 920 out of date? What CPU would you consider up to date?
Well, thanks for the testing.
Your test CPU is not up to date. It does not do any justice to this card especially at the low resolution.
Thanks for the write-up Duke, exactly what I needed
As neither are out yet, we have no idea
Hopefully we will be getting both cards to test, then we could answer this for you.
So, with that review, Nvidea or ATI still.
XD
I’m trying to decide between two.
Nivdea 590′s or two 6990′s from ATI.