With the launch of their Southern Islands architecture, AMD proved they still have what it takes to engineer a class leading graphics core. The 28nm Tahiti XT core which graced the flagship HD 7970 packed 4.3 billion transistors into a compact, efficient design and easily wrested the “fastest single GPU” title away from NVIDIA’s GTX 580. Initial availability may not have been quite up to some people’s expectations and the cards did run a bit loud (an issue which has supposedly been corrected on the retail products) but otherwise, we felt it was a nearly perfect graphics card.