Sapphire HD7970 Overclock Edition (Dual-X) Review

1. Introduction2. Sapphire HD7970 Overclock Edition (Dual-X)3. Sapphire HD7970 Overclock Edition (Dual-X) (Super High Res Gallery)4. Testing Methodology5. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark6. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage7. Synthetic: 3DMark 118. Synthetic: HQV Benchmark 2.09. Gaming: F1 201110. Gaming: HomeFront11. Gaming: Alien V Predator12. Gaming: Dead Island13. Gaming: Tom Clancy HAWX 214. Gaming: Resident Evil 515. Gaming: Far Cry 216. Gaming: Total War Shogun 217. Technical: Acoustics Performance18. Technical: Thermal Dynamics19. Technical: Power Consumption20. Technical: Overclocking21. Closing Thoughts22. View All Pages

Very few manufacturers can compete with Sapphire when it comes to creating a flagship video card. Over the last year they have consistently released some of the finest graphics cards to market. Today we are looking at their latest high end HD7970 Overclock Edition which is supplied with twin bios overclock configurations and proprietary twin fan cooling solution.

There is no doubt that AMD's HD7970 is a powerful video card which is currently leading the performance charts, but when we reviewed the reference card a few months ago we weren't that impressed with the cooling solution. It was certainly a step up from the previous generation, but there is only so much you can do with a solitary, tiny, high spinning fan.

Since then we have analysed the XFX DD HD7970 and VTX3D's overclocked HD7970 X Edition, both of which significantly improved on the reference cooling solution.

This HD7970 Overclock Edition from Sapphire ships with a menacing, black Dual X cooler and offers not one, but two pre-overclocked settings.

Product	Sapphire HD7970 Overclock Edition	AMD HD7950	AMD HD7870	AMD HD7850
Core Clock speed	925mhz bios1: (950mhz) bios2: (1000mhz)	800mhz	1000mhz	860mhz
Transistors	4.31 billion	4.31 billion	2.8 billion	2.8 billion
Stream Processors	2,048	1,792	1,280	1,024
Compute Performance	3.79 TFLOPS	2.87 TFLOPS	2.56 TFLOPS	1.76 TFLOPS
Texture Units	128	112	80	64
Texture Fillrate	118.4 GT/s	89.6 GT/s	80 GT/s	55.0 GT/s
ROPs	32	32	32	32
Pixel Fillrate	29.6 GP/s	25.6 GP/s	32.0 GP/s	27.52 GP/s
Z/Stencil	128	128	128	128
Memory Type	3GB GDDR5	3GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5	2GB GDDR5
Memory Clock	1,375mhz bios1: (1,425mhz) bios2: (1,450mhz)	1,250mhz	1,200mhz	1,200mhz
Memory Data Rate	5.5 GBps bios1: (5.7Gbps) bios2: (5.8Gbps)	5.0 Gbps	4.8 Gbps	4.8 Gbps
Memory Bandwidth	264 GB/s	240 GB/s	153.6 GB/s	153.6 GB/s

Above we can see the two bios configurations that Sapphire have pre-configured. The default ‘first' setting offers a very modest 25mhz overclock on the core, while the memory is overclocked from 1,375mhz to 1,425 mhz. The ‘second' setting offers additional overclock speeds with a more aggressive fan profile, increasing the core speed to 1ghz, and the memory to 1,450mhz.

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