Compared to a standard HD 7970, Gigabyte’s SOC offering was 19% faster at 2560x1600 while it was also 14% faster than the GHz Edition card. Our 1200MHz core overclock only boosted performance by another 2%, while 1260MHz was 6% faster, likely due to the massive increase in GDDR5 frequency. Whereas the HD 7970 GHz Edition was slightly slower than the GTX 680, losing by 1fps, the HD 7970 SOC was 5fps faster. Meanwhile, our 1.3v overclock allowed the SOC card to match the performance of the dual-GPU GTX 590.
When testing Crysis 2 at 2560x1600, the HD 7970 SOC was 6% faster than the standard and GHz Edition cards, which scored an equal 32fps. Gigabyte’s solution also managed to outpace the GTX 680, while our custom 1200MHz and 1260MHz overclocks boosted the performance by 3% and 6%, respectively. Again, this made the 1.3v configuration faster than the GTX 590.