AMD Radeon HD 7970 Three-Way CrossFire Setup Benches 21,655 in 3DMark 11

Posted 01/02/2012 at 10:26am | by Paul Lilly

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While most of us were sitting around watching football and ringing in the New Year over the holiday weekend, our friends over at VR-Zone were getting their geek on by modding and benchmarking AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards. They started with a single HD 7970 board, of which they quickly modded with a special BIOS that allowed them to bump up the core voltage from 1.15V to 1.25V.

This allowed them to overclock the core clockspeed to 1,267MHz, a whopping 37 percent boost over the card's stock 925MHz clockspeed. With temps in check, VR-Zone benchmarked the OC'd card and a posted a 3DMark 11 score of 10,259 using the Performance preset, and 3,490 using the Extreme preset.

They could have called it a weekend, but instead VR-Zone decided to kick the tires on three HD 7970 graphics cards for some tri-Fire fun as they await on a fourth card to arrive. Unfortunately their voltage tool didn't play nice with multiple cards, but they were still able to overclock all three to 1,100MHz on the core and 1,500MHz on the memory, enough to post 3DMark 11 scores more than twice as high as a single card, though well short of triple.

The three-way setup posted a Performance preset score of 21,655 and an Extreme preset score of 8,973, and pulled nearly 200 frames per second in Battlefield 3. All benchmark runs were aided by an Intel Core i7 3960X processor overclocked to 4.68GHz.

Image Credit: AMD