7970/7950 user experience?

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FuzzyKittens

Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 7, 2011
Messages
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I'm looking to upgrade my existing setup of GTX560's in SLI to a single 7970/7950 i saw listed in the FS/FT forums, but i'd like some user input if you guys are happy with your cards or have any issues? so far i know the 7900 series has trouble in crossfire so that def a negative as i do want to CF later on.
 
Well, I had a Sapphire 7950 OC for about a week, however the card worked fine in DVI output but in HDMI, I was getting some bizarre horizontal lines in many games. I'm certain the card just had an issue and it wasn't the 7950 design, but still Sapphire is a first tier manufacturer so I was pretty dissapointed. I sent the card back for a refund, While I had it, it was plenty fast enough to run every game with all the bells and whistles turned on although I can't explain why NFS Shift runs so poorly on AMD cards. Even though my framerates were in the 50's with AA enabled, the game just felt very choppy and stuttered a lot. Most other games I played with felt pretty good though. I previously had crossfire 6870's in that machine.
 
FuzzyKittens said:
so far i know the 7900 series has trouble in crossfire so that def a negative as i do want to CF later on.
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I've got two 7970s and I haven't had any trouble. I have only played a handful of games yet though, but those work great. Currently playing The Witcher 2 and Crysis 2. No problems outside game playing either, I use that PC for many other things as well.
 
I have a reference 7950, excellent card. Not using it anymore (got a 670 instead) since it won't overclock my korean 2560x1440 monitor high enough ( :( ) but that is not something I'm guessing matters to you. It crushed all my games, never had driver issues, was quieter + cooler than my old card (Okay a 4870X2 is louder and hotter than everything but still).

I can happily recommend the card to anybody who asks.
 
No issues here with a single 7970, but I bought it with no intention of going dual GPU. My experiences with AMD dual GPU setups have been generally poor, single card is great though.
 
Single 7970 working great for me. Though i cant imagine it being much of a upgrade from your 560 sli setup.
 
What about the issue of computer not responding when coming out of sleep mode on the 7900 series cards? Has that been fixed? Was it a driver problem?
 
I've had my Radeon HD 7970 since the week they launched. I haven't had any problems with it. Been a great card.
 
Dan_D said:
I've had my Radeon HD 7970 since the week they launched. I haven't had any problems with it. Been a great card.
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I never noticed before that you had one. Youre running three 30" Dells? Thats 7680x1600 right? A single 7970 can handle gaming at that or do you only use 1 screen for gaming?
 
MacLeod said:
I never noticed before that you had one. Youre running three 30" Dells? Thats 7680x1600 right? A single 7970 can handle gaming at that or do you only use 1 screen for gaming?
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It can handle it with some older games. I was having trouble with my GTX 580's and switched to this. Usually I just game on one monitor. I will be upgrading before too long. I've held off any spending at all lately as I'm buying a house. This is why I've let my computer age so much lately.
 
Dan_D said:
This is why I've let my computer age so much lately.
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Yeah, Im surprised you can even boot into Windows with that rig. ;)

Just wait til you get the house. Things get really expensive then! That really cut down on my toy budget.
 
MacLeod said:
Yeah, Im surprised you can even boot into Windows with that rig. ;)

Just wait til you get the house. Things get really expensive then! That really cut down on my toy budget.
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It's actually going to increase my budget. My mortgage will be less than I'm paying in rent right now. Utility costs will be lower as well. The new place is much more efficient than this one is.
 
I sold my sli Gtx 570 setup to run a single 7970. Got the sapphire OC model for $450. I have absolutely zero regrets in doing so, gaming experience on my 3x1080p monitors is much quieter, lots cooler, and I can use AA! I've seen up to 3000 mb of Vram usage in Skyrim with mods and 8x AA + FXAA.
If you are running a single monitor I don't know that it will buy you the same advantages that it provided for me though...
 
Dan_D said:
It's actually going to increase my budget. My mortgage will be less than I'm paying in rent right now. Utility costs will be lower as well. The new place is much more efficient than this one is.
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Oh, youre one of "those" guys. You know, the ones that are smarter than I am and actually buying a house thats within your means. Where's the fun in that?

We got the nice big house thinking we were never going to have kids. A year later....oops. So its 2 jobs for me. But yeah, smart thinking on your part.

Back on topic, anybody think these things will get down closer to $400? With the GTX670 basically equaling the 7970's performance, I would think AMD would drop the price a little. A 7970 for like $420 would be a great deal considering how well these things overclock.
 
MacLeod said:
Oh, youre one of "those" guys. You know, the ones that are smarter than I am and actually buying a house thats within your means. Where's the fun in that?

We got the nice big house thinking we were never going to have kids. A year later....oops. So its 2 jobs for me. But yeah, smart thinking on your part.

Back on topic, anybody think these things will get down closer to $400? With the GTX670 basically equaling the 7970's performance, I would think AMD would drop the price a little. A 7970 for like $420 would be a great deal considering how well these things overclock.
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The real issue is that I'm paying too much in rent. The house is within my means, but it's way larger than I need. But I have a lot of hobbies and like to spread out. And *if* I wanted kids later, I'd have room for them. I wanted to buy a house that I'd be able to live in for the next several years. Decades even.
 
Am I the only one that has had problems with my HD7970? Dual displays is a nightmare with this card. I get random black screen/blue screen crashes and random artifacts/blue snow both 2d and 3d. This is from a clean install of windows 7, fresh drivers and no AV. I've also been through all of the driver versions from 12.2 to 12.3>4 and even the 12.5 beta. I swapped the card 3 times at microcenter before just returning the card, and purchasing a GTX 670.

I am a amd fanboy throughout, but soon as i switched to the GTX670 my problems dissolved, such a sad day.
 
Dan_D said:
The real issue is that I'm paying too much in rent. The house is within my means, but it's way larger than I need. But I have a lot of hobbies and like to spread out. And *if* I wanted kids later, I'd have room for them. I wanted to buy a house that I'd be able to live in for the next several years. Decades even.
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Ha! Better not underline that "if" too much there homie. I didnt want any, we werent planning on any and we didnt even thing she could have any cause her sisters couldnt. We were together for years and never had any close calls. Then one freaking year after we buy the big house....."huh? Late for what?" :eek:

$600 a month daycare. You have no idea how that grinds my gears. Thats a GTX680 and H100 cooler every month! :mad:
 
[H]ard|Forum: where I get to learn about tech AND grown-up life all in the same place. :)

Anyway, to answer 2 posts above, I've had nothing but problems since switching from 560ti SLI setup to 7970. This was also my first time trying a modern Ati/AMD card. Terrible, terrible experience. Dropped frames, flickering, and less than stellar scaling on overclocks.

Now I see why people are ragging on the drivers all the time. Sigh. And I somehow thought I'd be immune. That'll teach me to listen to all the complaints on this forum.

I really wanted to be an AMD fanboy too, but I think I may have to jump back, and just skip GPU compute-related stuff for this generation (680, here I come)
 
Yes, its definitely hard being an AMD fanboy these days. They really flopped with Bulldozer and while their single card GPU's are very good, their dual card drivers are pretty bad. Now Nvidia is putting the hammer down with their GTX600 series. Im not jumping ship yet. Im gonna give them til Piledriver to decide. It thats a flop, Ill turn in my fanboy card I suppose and begrudgingly come on over to Intel/Nvidia.
 
Been running two Gigabyte 7950's with little issue. Pleased with how quiet and cool they are.
 
MacLeod said:
Ha! Better not underline that "if" too much there homie. I didnt want any, we werent planning on any and we didnt even thing she could have any cause her sisters couldnt. We were together for years and never had any close calls. Then one freaking year after we buy the big house....."huh? Late for what?" :eek:

$600 a month daycare. You have no idea how that grinds my gears. Thats a GTX680 and H100 cooler every month! :mad:
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I don't have accidents like that. I'm not planning on having them and take steps to prevent it. I'm looking to get fixed in the near future. I don't trust women who say they can't get pregnant because their sisters can't or whatever. I've heard all that nonsense before. Not trusting that has served me well.
 
I waited until I was 36 to have my first child and it wasn't planned. I didn't think I was prepared and was pretty stressed about how much future would change. My son is now 15 months old and I wouldn't have it any other way other than I wish I had him sooner. Kids are THE greatest gift to man and you'll never understand it until you have them. Just hearing about it from others just isn't the same, I promise you.
 
Blkout said:
I waited until I was 36 to have my first child and it wasn't planned. I didn't think I was prepared and was pretty stressed about how much future would change. My son is now 15 months old and I wouldn't have it any other way other than I wish I had him sooner. Kids are THE greatest gift to man and you'll never understand it until you have them. Just hearing about it from others just isn't the same, I promise you.
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Don't care. Not interested in that. Many people say that, but also many people resent their kids for tying them down and changing their lives. Also I prefer to continue in my selfish ways buying whatever I want. :cool:
 
I bought 2 sapphire 7970s on release and put them through hell and back, oh by the way they overclock to 1250 with accelero's. I have another rig with 680's as well. Love them both.

Anyway, I think the 7970s are awesome especially when overclocked....I have nothing bad to say....A lot of nvidia loyal fans will definitely pounce on and attack AMD a lot, so don't read into stuff like that too much - but honestly i've never had issues at all with ATI cards. Or nvidia for that matter.....
 
FuzzyKittens said:
I'm looking to upgrade my existing setup of GTX560's in SLI to a single 7970/7950 i saw listed in the FS/FT forums, but i'd like some user input if you guys are happy with your cards or have any issues? so far i know the 7900 series has trouble in crossfire so that def a negative as i do want to CF later on.
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I never had a gaming or BSOD issue with a single HD 7970 at default settings. But I did have some minor issues with crossfire.

I had one issue with Anno 2070 with the RC11 drivers that would terminate the game after a few hours of game play. Issue was resolved when Crossfire was disabled. Had another issue with Mass Effect 3 in crossfire, the issue was if I alt tab like crazy when I was on the menu screeen. The game would freeze. It won't freeze if I don't go to the menu screen (also disabling crossfire resolved the menu screen tabing issue also). The final issue I had at the moment is Tera online. The game has negative scaling with Tera online. This issue is with the developer who at the present time, will not incorporate AMD crossfire fix at this time. But that's the only issue I had so far on my system since I got these videocards.

For dual GPUs, my HD 5970 didn't really take off till they released the summer drivers of that year when the HD 5970 was out. After that, it was smooth sailing. Hopefully this helped :)
 
Mr Mean said:
I never had a gaming or BSOD issue with a single HD 7970 at default settings. But I did have some minor issues with crossfire.

I had one issue with Anno 2070 with the RC11 drivers that would terminate the game after a few hours of game play. Issue was resolved when Crossfire was disabled. Had another issue with Mass Effect 3 in crossfire, the issue was if I alt tab like crazy when I was on the menu screeen. The game would freeze. It won't freeze if I don't go to the menu screen (also disabling crossfire resolved the menu screen tabing issue also). The final issue I had at the moment is Tera online. The game has negative scaling with Tera online. This issue is with the developer who at the present time, will not incorporate AMD crossfire fix at this time. But that's the only issue I had so far on my system since I got these videocards.

For dual GPUs, my HD 5970 didn't really take off till they released the summer drivers of that year when the HD 5970 was out. After that, it was smooth sailing. Hopefully this helped :)
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Yeah Tera online devs are being jerks about multi GPU. SLI doesn't work properly either.
 
I ran single 7950 and 7970 (XFX/ASUS) and had such a bad experience I cam recorded how poorly my computer would act in just 20 minutes and sent it to AMD in regards to their latest generation and drivers. Game compatibility was horrible. The games that came free with the cards wouldn't play as well as they would with my 5850, and my PC's W7 install corrupted not once but twice without any overclocking. I have never had these issues with any graphics card, and I am competent in building/customizing/watercooling/networking PCs. If they had better drivers I would LOVE their card, but they broke my PC. I had to reformat and used two different spinner HDD to make sure my software wasn't junk.

With the 670 out I would just buy one of those if I didn't already purchase a 680 from someone on these forums :)
 
Binge said:
I ran single 7950 and 7970 (XFX/ASUS) and had such a bad experience I cam recorded how poorly my computer would act in just 20 minutes and sent it to AMD in regards to their latest generation and drivers. Game compatibility was horrible. The games that came free with the cards wouldn't play as well as they would with my 5850, and my PC's W7 install corrupted not once but twice without any overclocking. I have never had these issues with any graphics card, and I am competent in building/customizing/watercooling/networking PCs. If they had better drivers I would LOVE their card, but they broke my PC. I had to reformat and used two different spinner HDD to make sure my software wasn't junk.

With the 670 out I would just buy one of those if I didn't already purchase a 680 from someone on these forums :)
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Sometimes some cards are just not compatible with some peoples mobo.

Robozilla said:
Yeah, definitely know mine is a more serious issue. Clearly a deep incompatibility with my motherboard as the cards work fine on a different one i tested. Frustrating, none the less.
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CaNNoN_1981 said:
Did you test the cards in crossfire on diff mobo?
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Robozilla said:
Yeah i did, an Asrock Extreme 7 Gen 3 - worked fine. I'm using a Z77 G1.Sniper 3 in my own machine and it seems to disagree with these cards. I'm running the latest bios so no avenues to go down there.
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CaNNoN_1981 said:
The issue may lay entirely with your motherboard than the cards. The fact they work perfect in another machine kinda proves this. Might be an idea to looks at a motherboard solution rather than jacking it in with the cards.
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http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18403851&page=2
 
Blkout said:
I waited until I was 36 to have my first child and it wasn't planned. I didn't think I was prepared and was pretty stressed about how much future would change. My son is now 15 months old and I wouldn't have it any other way other than I wish I had him sooner. Kids are THE greatest gift to man and you'll never understand it until you have them. Just hearing about it from others just isn't the same, I promise you.
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Totally agree. Didnt plan on my little boy and I pissed and moaned for 7 months whining about all the things I wasnt going to be able to do anymore and so on. That all lasted til I saw the little brat on the ultra sound and you could make out his face. Havent thought about that other crap since.

Back OT - I have to admit I am hearing a lot more complaints on all the forums about problems with the 7970 in games compatibility even in single card configurations. Im used to hearing bitching about Crossfire setups but this is the first time I can remember so many widespread complaints about a single card.
 
MacLeod said:
Totally agree. Didnt plan on my little boy and I pissed and moaned for 7 months whining about all the things I wasnt going to be able to do anymore and so on. That all lasted til I saw the little brat on the ultra sound and you could make out his face. Havent thought about that other crap since.

Back OT - I have to admit I am hearing a lot more complaints on all the forums about problems with the 7970 in games compatibility even in single card configurations. Im used to hearing bitching about Crossfire setups but this is the first time I can remember so many widespread complaints about a single card.
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The 7xxx is going to be the worst of both single and CF worlds as its driver is written from scratch.
 
Binge said:
Thank you for the insight! I guess my 3 mobos are not up to snuff for those cards (DFI x58, P55 UD-5, and Z77 ASRock? Well I still feel drivers are to blame entirely. Why release a card with motherboard incompatibilities?
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The issue isn't that cut and dry. But AMD sucks in the firmware / driver department. That being said, as a general rule NVIDIA's dual GPU cards are an atrocity in regard to option ROM / firmware issues.
 
Dan_D said:
The issue isn't that cut and dry. But AMD sucks in the firmware / driver department. That being said, as a general rule NVIDIA's dual GPU cards are an atrocity in regard to option ROM / firmware issues.
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If this issue is not as simple as drivers saving the 7XXX series then AMD has more to worry about. NV may have some picky multi-gpu software, but at least one card will have a great user experience. Don't worry though bro I love my 5850. Again hypothetically speaking... more than just drivers the issue with 7XXX? wth AMD please release finished products. You know since the issue isn't cut and dry it makes me worry.
 
Binge said:
If this issue is not as simple as drivers saving the 7XXX series then AMD has more to worry about. NV may have some picky multi-gpu software, but at least one card will have a great user experience. Don't worry though bro I love my 5850. Again hypothetically speaking... more than just drivers the issue with 7XXX? wth AMD please release finished products. You know since the issue isn't cut and dry it makes me worry.
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Well what I mean is, AMD has firmware issues / BIOS issues with some motherboards. Sometimes you get boards that have timing issues / syncing issues which prevent them from functioning properly in the UEFI / BIOS. There are also Crossfire / CrossfireX issues that I've seen with some cards which I've never understood the nature of. NVIDIA typically has really screwed up option ROMs. Or more to the point, excessively large option ROMs on dual GPU cards which cause problems as well. Single card for single card, NVIDIA is usually better than AMD, but dual GPU cards on the AMD side seem to be a bit more well thought out. Many of these issues can be overcome on a board level. In this regard ASUS is one of the better companies for dealing with this.

Of course with non-reference designs, all that's out the window.
 
Dan_D said:
Don't care. Not interested in that. Many people say that, but also many people resent their kids for tying them down and changing their lives. Also I prefer to continue in my selfish ways buying whatever I want. :cool:
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Anyone that resents their kids for tying them down has issues.
 
Single 7970 here, and I haven't had any major issues, although I wouldn't go CFX at the moment
 
2 7970 in cf, nothing but trouble. it's been a pure hell so far.

Running my system with cf disabled for the moment.

bah
 
Dan_D said:
Well what I mean is, AMD has firmware issues / BIOS issues with some motherboards. Sometimes you get boards that have timing issues / syncing issues which prevent them from functioning properly in the UEFI / BIOS. There are also Crossfire / CrossfireX issues that I've seen with some cards which I've never understood the nature of. NVIDIA typically has really screwed up option ROMs. Or more to the point, excessively large option ROMs on dual GPU cards which cause problems as well. Single card for single card, NVIDIA is usually better than AMD, but dual GPU cards on the AMD side seem to be a bit more well thought out. Many of these issues can be overcome on a board level. In this regard ASUS is one of the better companies for dealing with this.

Of course with non-reference designs, all that's out the window.
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so what you're saying is that the 7000 series has compatibility issues on a bios level?
That sucks big time...

I went from an x58 asus motherboard to an x79 asus motherboard, the latter of which uses UEFI. If that really is the issue then what can i possibly do to resolve the problems i'm having? Unless amd releases a new bios/epic driver fix i will be fucked over big time...
 
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