The 7970 Monster Edition: A Beast of a Card from 2012

I decided to take on a little hardware hunt and see how the AMD Radeon HD 7970 "Monster Edition" would hold up in 2018. This card was released back in 2012, but it's still capable of producing some impressive results. I set up my rig with the Monster Edition card, which featured a single fan, a 1 GHz core clock, and 1375 MHz memory speed.

As I began running through some benchmarks, I noticed that even one single fan wasn't breaking a 70 frame rate in Overwatch or Battlefield 1. These are not bad numbers for a card from 2012, especially considering the Tahiti card's specs are equivalent to an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 or 280X. The 7-inch Tahiti card is equivalent to a full-size R9 280X and also has the same ATX form factor as the R9 280.

I ran through some benchmarks on this rig, including Overwatch: Battlegrounds, Battlefield 1, and PUBG. I was very well surprised with how these games performed on the Monster Edition card. In Overwatch: Battlegrounds, textures had to be tuned down to medium due to the three-gigabyte RAM limit, but medium settings put it around 2.5-2.6 GB/s, which is still a relatively high performance level.

In Battlefield 1, I saw an average frame rate of 70 FPS, with a minimum frame rate of 51.5 FPS and a maximum frame rate of 100 FPS. The 1% low frame rate was around 47 FPS, while the 0.1% low frame rate was 2.029 FPS. This is extremely playable even through some drops in performance. The most important number here, however, is the average FPS, which stands at 70 FPS.

Next up was Overwatch, where I saw an average frame rate of 132 FPS, with a minimum frame rate of 54.7 FPS and a maximum frame rate of 201.9 FPS. The 1% low frame rate was around 60 FPS, while the 0.1% low frame rate was 18.9 FPS. This means that Overwatch will run smoothly almost no matter what, making it a great game for older hardware.

Finally, I tested PUBG, which saw an average frame rate of 60.7 FPS, with a minimum frame rate of 19.9 FPS and a maximum frame rate of 106.9 FPS. The 1% low frame rate was around 13.6 FPS, while the 0.1% low frame rate was 1.5 FPS. This is extremely playable, especially in the starting area where players tend to bunch up before the match starts.

In conclusion, this 7970 Monster Edition card from 2012 still holds up well today, and it's a great example of AMD's ability to create high-performance graphics cards that can hold their own for years after release. The fact that I was able to get this card for $60 is also a testament to its continued relevance in the world of gaming.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone Christmas coalition gaming here and just doing a quick little hardware hunt mini vlog I guess you could say so I've been working on putting together an X 58 system for my fiance's little brother to be his first PC build and that first pc build is gonna be using an x 5656 core cpu we're gonna overclock that and one of the motherboards that I got in the other hardware hundred videos that'll be linked right up here and so feel free to check that out we're gonna go ahead and head out and grab that part because I will not that part but the graphics card I just made a deal on the graphics card graphic card prices well they're crazy let's not really get into that right now but I grab managed to find a 79 70 which I believe is a gigabyte and that runs at a gigahertz core clock I'm not sure that makes it big gigahertz Edition or not but either way it's not a terrible graphics card to start out with for your first build and it can play most things on medium is set into 1080p so we should be in good shape with a GPU like that so we're gonna go ahead head out and pick that up from the guy that I made the deal with so I got that through offer up so I mean you know most people just check Craigslist eBay stuff like that no luck there but offer up and let go other apps that have been becoming more popular have some luck there so yeah let's get to navigate to Starbucks McKinley in Corona showing results for Starbucks in McKinley in Corona we're heading out so we're gonna go pick up the Gigabyte 7970 and from what I understand it's got a modified cooler on it there's some sort of a custom cooler so one of the reasons I got it for 60 bucks and at $60 it's gonna do pretty well so probably at least a good as good as a 1050 Ti I hope we'll see so we've arrived at the Starbucks we're gonna be meeting the seller at so just waiting for his confirmation that he's arrived I don't see him out there yet so just waiting Oh phone ring so here we are with these gigabyte 7970 so I did a little research really quickly and I found out that this is a proline matech MK 26 GPU cooler this thing is a monster I'll see about switching it over with the Arctic twin turbo accelerant but I think I might leave this on I might just have to check the thermal paste on it but it's just a monster I got to find out how to how to get the fans on there though but yeah I'm thinking it's gonna do great so can't wait to test it out so the deal was a success and at first when I plugged into the card onto my test bench to test it out going straight into DVI I didn't get anything and that kind of worried me obviously but using a going through HDMI I took care of the issue so HDMI all good and my man I did a little research on that cooler and the cooler itself yeah it goes for about $70 now obviously it comes with a clip so you can put your fans on and I didn't get it with those clips it also comes with heat sinks to put on to the the vram modules and stuff like that but no such luck however I do have that stuff from this guy which was the original plan on getting a graphics card like this because I was supposed to be getting one that that didn't have a cooler on it but there's some delays on there and I really want to get going with a build for my fiance's little brother already so here we are and fortunately it all worked out 60 bucks with this big honkin cooler on it I didn't manage to get a single 120 watt 120 millimeter fan on there and that's connected to the motherboard 2/3 pin so it's running at whatever speed that the header is already set at should be full speed fortunately the fan is quiet so I can't even really notice it and running heaven which you can see running back there it won't break 70 C so I know the product the coop they can still do better if I had a proper fan set up on this cooler but even one single if one single fan on they're not breaking 70 see that's that's pretty nice that's not bad for a Tahiti card the 7-inch 17 is equivalent to be 280 r9 280x which is basically the same as they are 93 ATX so so yeah so we I ran through a few benchmarks on there did overwatch battlegrounds and battlefield 1 and I was very well surprised with that one now textures and battlegrounds had to be tuned down to medium because at high it really pushes the three gigabyte ram limit but medium put puts it down to around 2.5 to 2.6 to be around and it does really well there and so let's talk about those benchmarks up first with battlefield 1 we have an average frame rate of 70 FPS a minimum frame rate of 51 and a half FPS maximum frame rate of 100 and 1.9 FPS 1% low frame rate of 47 and 0.1% low of 2029 now the 1% though there means that it remains very playable even through some drops and the maximum frame rate means that in some moments you can actually get a really good yes sir but the most important number here is the average fps and I guess you can say dar giggles that is most important next to 1% low or something like that but either way 70 FPS on average battlefield varna was running in the high preset which with HDR off at 1680 by 1050 and these are some really good numbers for that up next with overwatch we had an average frame weight of 132 FPS a minimum frame rate of 54.7 mph 201 point is 1% low of 60 and 0.1% load 18.9 that 1% low of 60 means that that game is going to run smooth almost no matter what that game is just it's a well optimized game for 4 especially for older hardware so yeah it's a great running game and in an average frame rate of 132 yes if you happen to have a high refresh rate monitor paired with this maybe even a free sink although fishing isn't actually supported on these but just a high refresh rate in general you will be able to really see some good smoothness with that yeah so that's overwatch and finally pub G so we have an average frame rate of 60 7.5 FPS so that's really great managed to stay above 60 on the average the minimum frame rate of nineteen point nine fps a maximum of one hundred and six point nine fps one percent low of thirteen point six and is zero point one percent low one point five now that one percent low is this typical of background especially in the the starting area where everybody is all just still congregated until the match starts but uh but once the game gets up and running the it tends to smooth out nowadays at one point it made a big difference so the average frame rate of 67.5 maintained over 60 fps and this is on a mix of mostly medium with a little bit of lower very low on there so it still looked great but but you didn't really lose too much performance on there so we maintaining an average over sixty is pretty great especially on the hardware especially for something from what 2012 2013 something like that yeah so batter graphs there you go so that's the 7970 monstrosity Edition really cool that and got to go on another little hardware hunt I guess you could put it and got to see how the 7970 at least in stock form at one gigahertz core clock and 1375 megahertz memory speed well it's good to see how that how how that fares in 2018 so it actually fares pretty well and you know you're gonna get a lot of people be like AMD fine wine fine wine hell yeah oh great I mean that's really awesome and and if you can get a graphics card that is still somewhat effective what four five years after its original release maybe more than that you can't really argue with that and you know getting it for sixty bucks can't whether you argue with that so I can't wait to put this into the build well I'm not going to do it I'm gonna be coaching the my fiance's little brother and as he puts this together but I can't wait to get that bill together the car still not gonna be the prettiest unfortunately but it's going to get the job done this build is all about function over form and can't wait to get it all put together anyways if you guys like this video click that like button right subscribe for more we always have more coming and I see you guys in the next onehey everyone Christmas coalition gaming here and just doing a quick little hardware hunt mini vlog I guess you could say so I've been working on putting together an X 58 system for my fiance's little brother to be his first PC build and that first pc build is gonna be using an x 5656 core cpu we're gonna overclock that and one of the motherboards that I got in the other hardware hundred videos that'll be linked right up here and so feel free to check that out we're gonna go ahead and head out and grab that part because I will not that part but the graphics card I just made a deal on the graphics card graphic card prices well they're crazy let's not really get into that right now but I grab managed to find a 79 70 which I believe is a gigabyte and that runs at a gigahertz core clock I'm not sure that makes it big gigahertz Edition or not but either way it's not a terrible graphics card to start out with for your first build and it can play most things on medium is set into 1080p so we should be in good shape with a GPU like that so we're gonna go ahead head out and pick that up from the guy that I made the deal with so I got that through offer up so I mean you know most people just check Craigslist eBay stuff like that no luck there but offer up and let go other apps that have been becoming more popular have some luck there so yeah let's get to navigate to Starbucks McKinley in Corona showing results for Starbucks in McKinley in Corona we're heading out so we're gonna go pick up the Gigabyte 7970 and from what I understand it's got a modified cooler on it there's some sort of a custom cooler so one of the reasons I got it for 60 bucks and at $60 it's gonna do pretty well so probably at least a good as good as a 1050 Ti I hope we'll see so we've arrived at the Starbucks we're gonna be meeting the seller at so just waiting for his confirmation that he's arrived I don't see him out there yet so just waiting Oh phone ring so here we are with these gigabyte 7970 so I did a little research really quickly and I found out that this is a proline matech MK 26 GPU cooler this thing is a monster I'll see about switching it over with the Arctic twin turbo accelerant but I think I might leave this on I might just have to check the thermal paste on it but it's just a monster I got to find out how to how to get the fans on there though but yeah I'm thinking it's gonna do great so can't wait to test it out so the deal was a success and at first when I plugged into the card onto my test bench to test it out going straight into DVI I didn't get anything and that kind of worried me obviously but using a going through HDMI I took care of the issue so HDMI all good and my man I did a little research on that cooler and the cooler itself yeah it goes for about $70 now obviously it comes with a clip so you can put your fans on and I didn't get it with those clips it also comes with heat sinks to put on to the the vram modules and stuff like that but no such luck however I do have that stuff from this guy which was the original plan on getting a graphics card like this because I was supposed to be getting one that that didn't have a cooler on it but there's some delays on there and I really want to get going with a build for my fiance's little brother already so here we are and fortunately it all worked out 60 bucks with this big honkin cooler on it I didn't manage to get a single 120 watt 120 millimeter fan on there and that's connected to the motherboard 2/3 pin so it's running at whatever speed that the header is already set at should be full speed fortunately the fan is quiet so I can't even really notice it and running heaven which you can see running back there it won't break 70 C so I know the product the coop they can still do better if I had a proper fan set up on this cooler but even one single if one single fan on they're not breaking 70 see that's that's pretty nice that's not bad for a Tahiti card the 7-inch 17 is equivalent to be 280 r9 280x which is basically the same as they are 93 ATX so so yeah so we I ran through a few benchmarks on there did overwatch battlegrounds and battlefield 1 and I was very well surprised with that one now textures and battlegrounds had to be tuned down to medium because at high it really pushes the three gigabyte ram limit but medium put puts it down to around 2.5 to 2.6 to be around and it does really well there and so let's talk about those benchmarks up first with battlefield 1 we have an average frame rate of 70 FPS a minimum frame rate of 51 and a half FPS maximum frame rate of 100 and 1.9 FPS 1% low frame rate of 47 and 0.1% low of 2029 now the 1% though there means that it remains very playable even through some drops and the maximum frame rate means that in some moments you can actually get a really good yes sir but the most important number here is the average fps and I guess you can say dar giggles that is most important next to 1% low or something like that but either way 70 FPS on average battlefield varna was running in the high preset which with HDR off at 1680 by 1050 and these are some really good numbers for that up next with overwatch we had an average frame weight of 132 FPS a minimum frame rate of 54.7 mph 201 point is 1% low of 60 and 0.1% load 18.9 that 1% low of 60 means that that game is going to run smooth almost no matter what that game is just it's a well optimized game for 4 especially for older hardware so yeah it's a great running game and in an average frame rate of 132 yes if you happen to have a high refresh rate monitor paired with this maybe even a free sink although fishing isn't actually supported on these but just a high refresh rate in general you will be able to really see some good smoothness with that yeah so that's overwatch and finally pub G so we have an average frame rate of 60 7.5 FPS so that's really great managed to stay above 60 on the average the minimum frame rate of nineteen point nine fps a maximum of one hundred and six point nine fps one percent low of thirteen point six and is zero point one percent low one point five now that one percent low is this typical of background especially in the the starting area where everybody is all just still congregated until the match starts but uh but once the game gets up and running the it tends to smooth out nowadays at one point it made a big difference so the average frame rate of 67.5 maintained over 60 fps and this is on a mix of mostly medium with a little bit of lower very low on there so it still looked great but but you didn't really lose too much performance on there so we maintaining an average over sixty is pretty great especially on the hardware especially for something from what 2012 2013 something like that yeah so batter graphs there you go so that's the 7970 monstrosity Edition really cool that and got to go on another little hardware hunt I guess you could put it and got to see how the 7970 at least in stock form at one gigahertz core clock and 1375 megahertz memory speed well it's good to see how that how how that fares in 2018 so it actually fares pretty well and you know you're gonna get a lot of people be like AMD fine wine fine wine hell yeah oh great I mean that's really awesome and and if you can get a graphics card that is still somewhat effective what four five years after its original release maybe more than that you can't really argue with that and you know getting it for sixty bucks can't whether you argue with that so I can't wait to put this into the build well I'm not going to do it I'm gonna be coaching the my fiance's little brother and as he puts this together but I can't wait to get that bill together the car still not gonna be the prettiest unfortunately but it's going to get the job done this build is all about function over form and can't wait to get it all put together anyways if you guys like this video click that like button right subscribe for more we always have more coming and I see you guys in the next one\n"