As you can understand we have been really hard at work here on AfterBurner, it took a while to reverse engineer some data as AMD is not sharing it, but we now have Software Voltage activated on the Radeon HD 7970. You read it right, this is not a hardware voltage modification, but software controlled.

The results are very interesting - we got the card towards 1278 MHz on the GPU core.  To mage that we needed to apply a very high 1.3V into the GPU to achieve this though. Next to that too break free from AMD's limitations we need to use the more unstable unofficial overclocking mode.

With this voltage level activated and the GPU stressed we calculated a peak power draw of 305 Watt, which is still not bad really. We all did this with the reference cooler, it was set at 70% RPM though, and that is just noisy as heck. But hey, this is to proof a point, and is not about silence. This fan RPM setting however allowed us to keep the card under 70 degrees C at 100% GPU load.

Though we did managed to run 3DMark 11 as shown below, but at this clock frequency and stage the card is not 100% stable. We do expect though with Voltage tweaking you inevitably can end up in-between 1175 and 1300 MHz on this GPU. And nearing 1.3 GHz is just downright amazing, especially when you realize that stock clock for the R7970 is 925 MHz.

Obviously if you hunt down such performance levels, really .. you'd be so much better off with liquid cooling, that in fact might result into even better overclock as well.

Have a peek at the screenshots below (you can clock on the MSI one to enlarge it). The platform used was X58 / Core i7 965 Extreme @ 3.8 GHz / Radeon HD 7970. AfterBurner Beta 2.2.0 Beta 10 will be available for download soon for the public at Guru3D.com

Update we have released the new AfterBurner Beta, download here.