Quote:
Originally Posted by
raghu78 
If you missed the memo the Nvidia 304.48 beta drivers were used for the Radeon HD 7970 Ghz edition reviews at techreport, tomshardware, hardwarecanucks.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/23150/3
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7970-ghz-edition-review-benchmark,3232-6.html
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/54954-amd-radeon-hd-7970-3gb-ghz-edition-review-3.html
hardwarecanucks
"While we may have seen this all before from other pre-overclocked HD 7970 cards, under no circumstance should you overlook the GHz Edition. Performance per watt has certainly taken a step in the right direction, AMD’s Boost works when it has to and pricing is actually quite fair considering its framerate advantage at higher detail settings
. In our opinion and with all other things being equal, the HD 7970 GHz Edition is the card to have for ultra high resolution gaming . "
techreport
"The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition has indeed recaptured the single-GPU performance title for AMD; it's even faster than Zotac's GTX 680 AMP! Edition. And at $499.99, the 7970 GHz Edition is unambiguously a better value than the stock-clocked GeForce GTX 680. Everything seems to be going AMD's way—even our power consumption results turned out to be closer than expected."
tomshardware
"AMD’s driver team deserves to take this weekend off. Its beta Catalyst 12.7 build does stellar things to the performance of several games in our benchmark suite. No longer is Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 670 faster than the Radeon HD 7970. And, in fact, these new drivers are largely responsible for the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition card outmaneuvering GeForce GTX 680 in most of the tests we ran."
And also AMD addressed the concerns of noise with the ref HD 7970 Ghz edition by saying all AMD partners are coming out with their own custom cards. AMD is only supplying the new chips. The partners are going to come out with their own designs like Sapphire HD 7970 Toxic.
http://vr-zone.com/articles/sapphire-changes-upcoming-hd-7970-toxic-and-vapor-x-models-to-hd-7970-ghz-edition/16379.html
so I guess you will just have to accept that AMD really has the fastest GPU.
Accepting the 7970 as the fastest card just is not true, and ultimately you should accept it really depends on what game you intent to play, They both trade blows in different games
From anandtech:
Six years is a long time to wait, but patience, perseverance, and more than a few snub moves against NVIDIA have paid off for AMD. For the first time in 6 years we can say that AMD is truly competitive for the single-GPU performance crown.
The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition isn’t quite fast enough to outright win, but it is unquestionably fast enough to tie the GeForce GTX 680 as the fastest single-GPU video card in the world today
The end result is that while AMD has tied NVIDIA for the single-GPU performance crown with the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, the GeForce GTX 680 is still the more desirable gaming card. There are a million exceptions to this statement of course (and it goes both ways), but as we said before, these cards may be tied but they're anything but equal.
Noise issues aside, we’re finally seeing something that we haven’t seen for a very long time: bona fide, cut throat, brutal competition in the high-end video card segment for the fastest single-GPU video card. To call it refreshing is an understatement; it’s nothing short of fantastic. For the first time in six years AMD is truly performance competitive with NVIDIA at the high-end and we couldn't be happier.
