According to a post over at Atomicmps site, AMD has had its yields improve significantly and the company will launch the HD 7970 GHz Edition - a reference Tahiti XT-based graphics card that will run at beyond 1000MHz for the GPU.

Of course, some partners have jumped the gun and we have already seen some HD 7970 that are actually clocked higher than 1000MHz for the GPU, including the 1100MHz clocked Powercolor PCS+ HD 7970 Vortex II and Sapphire's HD 7970 Toxic, already seen during Cebit.

Of course, those were probably cherry picked samples but the current crop of AMD's Tahiti ES chips easily hit 1250MHz GPU clocks. The memory on HD 7970 GHz Edition cards should remain unchanged - 384-bit memory interface and 3GB of GDDR5 memory gives it a nice edge over the GTX 680.

The HD 7970 GHz Edition will of course go against Nvidia's GTX 680 and while it is still not clear if AMD plans to go over 1000MHz on reference cards, we are sure that partners will certainly follow with their own versions at some point in time.

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