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Which I see is a good thing. The flagship cards are after all not the main market but the mid range of 200-300Euro/Dollars. But for the companies the most important is of course right to brag with the fastest card on market :D

For now I am more than happy with the performance of this AMD 7970HD. It screams thru all games I've thrown it and by a margin over my previous 6970HD. The card is quiet, uses less power and temps are in check too. So far seen 30'C on idle and some 63-70'C while gaming..my case and cpu fan make more noise than this card :D Now it is just to wait for the drivers to mature a bit more, AMD has done great work with the card and their long term plan seems to pay off now :)

Did you manage to see typical GPU load percentage with the ATI Tray Tools?

For my old card it is 100% in most situations but IIRC for gtx580 it can be as low as 60-70%.

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Managed to get the usage with GPU-Z. Clocks ticked in normally 925/1375MHz, memory was used up to 921Mb average being 800Mb or so. GPU usage varied between 20-91%, average around 40-50%.

Only 40-50%? Is that a cpu bottleneck or is the games code at fault?

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Editor, my bet is on the game code. Eagerly waiting for the patch to see what it brings to the table :)

On the other hand this shows that the game scales well with CPU speed:

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Seems the 4GHz is the sweet spot as above it the gain is less. I rather run stock as other games cause run extremely well anyway.

Does anyone, AMD or Intel even make a cpu that runs stock at 4.0 or above?

The Intel Core i7 3960X comes close in turbo mode (3.9 GHz), but you really would just get the 3930X (3.8GHz) and overclock it for the $500+ difference ;)

Hi.

Thank you very much Flanker35M and Ataros. Very intresting results. I also wait the non-reference models like Asus DCII 7970. Have to wait middle of february.