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AMD Never Settle bundle gives Radeon HD 7000 buyers free games they'd actually care to play
Just about anyone who has bought more than one aftermarket graphics card knows that bundled games rarely matter. They're usually year-old titles or neutered editions built only to showcase the GPU's performance for a few hours. AMD thinks its Never Settle bundle might finally get us to notice. Buy any modern Radeon HD video card from the 7770 GHz Edition on up and you'll get a download code for at least one new game you'd genuinely want to try, ranging from Far Cry 3 on basic cards to a full three-game deal that supplies Far Cry 3, Hitman: Absolution and Sleeping Dogs to high rollers buying the 7900 series. There's likewise a discount for Medal of Honor: Warfighter and promises of bundles in 2013 for Bioshock Infinite and the reimagined Tomb Raider. As long as you're not dead set on springing for a GeForce board in the next few months, one of the qualifying cards might be worth a look to jumpstart your game collection.
AMD chops up to $50 off Radeon HD 7970, 7950 and 7870 graphics cards
The recent release of the Radeon HD 7970 Ghz Edition is having knock-on benefits further down the stack. $20 has now been shaved off the regular 7970 rrp in addition to the last discount we reported, while the 7950 is down $50 to $349 and the 7870 has also been nudged $50 deeper into the mid-range sweet spot at $249. Other cards in the line-up may also drop by some degree, although there's no official word on those just yet. These summer prices should start having an impact in stores from today -- just in time to benefit from the latest Catalyst 12.7 drivers, which promise to bring significant performance gains and hence even more tension to your NVIDIA product comparisons.
Triple-screen gaming setups put under the microscope, deemed an attainable luxury
Can't help salivating over gaming setups with three screens? The Tech Report knows your hunger, and aims to satiate your cravings with a detailed look at the triple-display efforts of Gigabyte's GeForce GTX 680 OC and ASUS' Radeon HD 7970 DirectCU II Top. The high-end GPUs ran Battlefield 3, Arkham City, Rage and a few other games through the wringer -- competing on temperature, game performance, noise level and more -- outputting each title in a glorious extra-wide resolution, with a few quirks on the side. The Tech Report emerged from the gauntlet reluctant to relinquish its additional displays, extolling the trial as the first "next-generation gaming experience" they've had in a while. What's this mean for you? The author sums it up nicely: "In a few short years, surround gaming has gone from being somewhat of an exotic luxury to something far more attainable." If snagging a multi-panel gaming setup is your goal, venture on to the source below where an unabridged, 11-page breakdown awaits.
AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition review roundup: a big, bad bruiser of a graphics card
You know the routine: we looked this revamped card's spec sheet a few hours ago, so now it's time to find out how it fared in independent tests and whether it's worth the $499 outlay. On the face of it, this powerhouse of a card ought to be a champ, since it comes $50 cheaper than the original's launch price (although that non-GHz Edition has now dropped to $449) and brings crucial improvements in clock speed and memory bandwidth. In practice? Well, it wins -- but only on points. Read on for more.
AMD launches Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, demands rematch with NVIDIA
If you've been missing out on the graphics card wars of late, then here's a quick rundown. AMD launched its high-end $549 Radeon HD 7970 at the end of last year, and it reigned comfortably for a few months until NVIDIA came out with the masterful GeForce GTX 680. That would have been the end of the matter, at least for this product cycle, except for one crucial factor: time. Having reached the market so much earlier, AMD has now had six months to not only tweak its drivers but also its 28nm silicon. That process has already culminated in 1GHz cards at the low- and mid-ranges, and today it leads to the (slightly predictable) announcement of a Radeon HD 7970 'GHz Edition' -- priced at $499 and expected to be available from a range of board makers from next week. To keep you amused in the meantime, there's plenty of detail in the gallery below and after the break. Update: review roundup added here.%Gallery-158843%
AMD previews FirePro W9000 graphics, possibly throws in dual-chip Radeon HD 7990 for good measure
AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster may have just dropped a minor graphics bombshell at the end of the AMD Fusion Developer Summit. His presentation was officially to show off the FirePro W9000, a beast of a workstation graphics card with 6GB of GDDR5 memory, a 264.8-megapixel fill rate and four teraflops of single-precision math. While the screen behind him showed the one-fan FirePro card, however, he was clearly holding another, three-fan card in his hands -- and though it could be that the W9000's cooling system went through a major revision between presentation slide and production, it may be a clue to a gamer-friendly Radeon part instead. Attendees like Tweakers.net have reason to believe it might be the Radeon HD 7990, a long-rumored dual-chip version of the 7900 series for the very upper echelons of gamers. If so, the bets are on it keeping up the tradition of having two slightly underclocked versions of AMD's fastest chip (here the Radeon HD 7970) working in tandem to produce a big leap in speed despite occupying the same two card slots. AMD hasn't set the matter straight with either a yea or a nay, but with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 690 largely cornering the high-end market unopposed, it's tough to picture AMD simply twiddling its thumbs.
AMD Radeon HD 7970 could get 'GHz Edition', put the hurtz on NVIDIA
AMD's Radeon HD 7770 and 7870 reference cards already sport 1GHz clock speeds, but so far the high-end flagship 7970 has been stuck at 925MHz. That'd be no big deal, perhaps, were it not for rival NVIDIA's benchmark-stealing GeForce GTX 680, which autonomously adjusts its clock speed on the fly and easily hits 1.2GHz under the right conditions. But while NVIDIA has yet to roll out its full stack of 28nm cards, AMD is finding plenty of time to play catch-up. According to Australian site Atomic MPC, the company has revealed that the manufacturing process of its next-gen GPUs has improved to the point where the same average voltages can yield much higher clock speeds. Recent chips can reach 1.25GHz without struggling, which means a conservative "GHz Edition" of the 7970 can now safely be rolled out, of course with scope for much higher overclocking on third-party boards with more robust coolers. By the time the battle between Red and Green reaches full-swing, it might not be so easy to call a winner.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 review roundup: (usually) worth the one grand
Now that NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 690 is shipping through some vendors, gamers have been wondering if it's worth the wallet-busting $999 to get those higher frame rates. Surprisingly, the answer is "yes." As AnandTech notes, the GTX 690 is often almost as fast or faster than a pair of GTX 680s working together in SLI mode, only using less power and running at cooler and quieter power levels through those two 28-nanometer Kepler chips. Across multiple reviewers, though, the GTX 690 was sometimes slower than two Radeon HD 7970 boards using CrossFire. HotHardware and others found that it's definitely the graphics card of choice for Batman: Arkham City enthusiasts: problems with AMD's CrossFire mode leave a dual Radeon HD 7970 setup running at just half the frame rate of its NVIDIA-made challenger. Caveats? There are still some worries beyond the price tag, as the twin Radeon cards are as much as three times faster at general-purpose computing tasks than the latest and greatest GeForce. PC Perspective likewise warns that fans of joining three displays together for some 3D Vision Surround action will still take a big frame rate hit when they put the 3D glasses on. Still, the GTX 690 looks to be tops if you're looking to get the fastest single-card gaming on Earth, and as Legit Reviews adds, that trivalent chromium-plated aluminum makes it one of the "better looking" cards, to boot. Read - AnandTech Read - HotHardware Read - Legit Reviews Read - PC Perspective
The Engadget Interview: AMD's Sasa Marinkovic
This isn't the easiest time to be an AMD fan. The company's eight-core FX-8150 desktop chip was widely panned on the review circuit, and then NVIDIA's GTX 680 graphics card ran off with Radeon HD's thunder. Even when you look at notebook processors, where AMD has long excelled with its Fusion APUs, the hype wars currently favor Ultrabooks and Ivy Bridge. Affection for the gamers' brand and its ATI back-story may make this stuff uncomfortable, but the predicament is already starting to mess with AMD's balance sheet. Which raises the obvious question: what's to be done? Sasa Marinkovic, AMD's Head of Desktop and Software Product Marketing, bravely took up the challenge of providing his side of the story -- even after we warned him that we'd try to disrupt his flow with accusatory glances. In the end, we did get him to acknowledge some recent hard knocks, particularly with respect to the FX chips and their (lack of) single-threaded performance. But we also got some insight into the mind of a chap who remains genuinely and abundantly confident about his employer's future. Read on and see for yourself.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 review round-up: see ya later, AMD
We've already been hands-on with NVIDIA's first Kepler GPU, but all those fancy features count for nuthin' if the benchmarks don't back them up. So do they? Huh? Do they? NVIDIA told us to expect a 10 to 40 percent performance boost from the $499 GTX 680, versus AMD's pricier Radeon HD 7970, and it appears that was no exaggeration. If you've bought yourself a high-end 28nm AMD card recently, try to hold back those tears until you've glanced over the reviews after the break. Let's just hope for a fairer fight when NVIDIA's mainstream and low-end cards come out to tackle AMD's 7800- and 7700-series -- and hey, some timely price drops could help to balance things too.
AMD Radeon HD 7970 now shipping: $550 and up for unlimited* frames-per-second
It's the Radeon HD 7970. It's wildly fast. It's quite possibly the exact device needed to serve up your latest Steam purchases in pure 1080p glory. And it's on sale now from none other than NewEgg, as linked in the source below. *Unlimited may or may not actually refer to unlimited, but as the carriers have taught us, we don't truly have to be accurate here.
Maingear says it will offer the AMD Radeon HD 7970 in its Shift, F131 and Vybe desktops
When AMD announced its latest flagship, the Radeon HD 7970, we knew it was fast and efficient (because reviewers said so!), but gamers were told they'd have to wait until the new year to try it themselves. Now, precisely on schedule, the card is available for purchase, and we're starting to hear word of systems that will be refreshed to include the 28nm card. Maingear just said that it will offer the 7970 inside its Shift and F131 desktops, followed by the Vybe at some later date. If you recall, the card has a 925MHz engine that can be overclocked to 1.1GHz, 2,048 stream processors and an unusual 384-bit memory bus serving 3GB of GDDR5 -- not to mention, it's capable of a mere 3W power draw in "long idle" mode. Need even more of a recap on how awesome this card is? Find the full PR after the break.
AMD Radeon HD 7970 review roundup: supremely fast, relatively efficient
AMD's next flagship graphics card was only announced a few hours ago, and it won't arrive on the gaming public's plate until January, but already the tech punditry has tasted it, tested it and spat out a soggy little piece of paper that reads: "the fastest single-GPU card in the world." What we're really looking for, though, is the type of performance that beats older rivals like NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580 without blowing the house up like a dual-GPU product. As it turns out, most reviewers agree that is exactly what this new $549 Radeon delivers, albeit with the few caveats summarized after the break.
