The HD 7970 SOC provided a massive 19% performance increase over the standard card along with a 12% lead over the GHz Edition. Interestingly, despite being so much faster than the standard HD 7970 out of the box, we couldn’t extract much more performance out of Gigabyte’s card. The 1200MHz overclock offered only 3% more speed and the 1260MHz overclock was even less impressive.
When testing with Max Payne 3, the HD 7970 SOC was 8% faster than the standard version and 6% quicker than the GHz Edition. Our 1200MHz overclock improved performance by another 4% while the 1260MHz overclock achieved 58fps, matching the HD 6990 and falling short of the GTX 590 by one measly frame.