Gigabyte’s Radeon HD 7970 Super Overclock is huge, heavy, overclocked, and very different-looking. Its Windforce 5X cooler employs five 40 mm fans. We benchmark the card, spend some time tweaking it, and measure the noise those blowers make.
Editor's Note: I don't want to spoil the end of today's story, but this card technically isn't available in the U.S. Instead, Gigabyte is selling the few it made in Europe and Asia, which works out well for our international audience. However, the company was kind enough to redirect one board to the States for the purpose of giving to a lucky Tom's Hardware reader. You're going to want to read through to the end of our coverage of the Radeon HD 7970 Super Overclock for your chance to win!
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Apparently, there is still such thing as cool-looking and technically-impressive graphics cards. Take Gigabyte’s Radeon HD 7970 Super Overclock with Windforce 5X as an example. The company didn't necessarily reinvent the wheel here, but it did introduce a new idea in cooling. Contrary to what we’re accustomed to seeing from axial-flow fans that pollute the inside of a chassis with heated air or centrifugal fans that push exhaust out of an I/O bracket, this particular product sucks warm air away from PCB, pushing it up and out the side of a case.
Of course, in order for this to work, you need an enclosure with an opening on the side. That's going to be a difficult prerequisite for many enthusiasts to satisfy. But the advantage you get is that warm air doesn't recirculate and impact other components inside of the system.
Gigabyte's approach is interesting. Large-diameter fans naturally won't fit. And air needs to be sucked in across the entire length of the card. So, the Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 Super Overclock uses a quintet of 40 mm fans.
Today, we want to answer three questions about this new card: How loud is it? How warm does it run? And how does it perform?
At first, we were most afraid that five small fans cooling a large GPU were going to generate a ton of noise. Fortunately, that wasn't the case. But we still needed to make some modifications of our own before we were satisfied with the card's performance.
We wanted to figure out just how far the Radeon HD 7970 Super Overclock's Windforce 5X cooling solutionwould let us overclock AMD's Tahiti GPU.
Our GPU achieves an ASIC score of 66.7 in GPU-Z, which isn't very good. But we managed to overclock it well anyway. Using 1.25 V, we managed to hit 1250 MHz. At 1.3 V, that number increased to 1300 MHz. Both values are stable for long-term gaming and under our stress tests. The memory was stable up to about 1500 MHz. We started running into problems (including lock-ups) at 1550 MHz.
If you push your GPU to 1.3 V, then you really want to retain the card's default fan speed profile. Our custom configuration resulted in temperatures as high as 90 degrees Celsius. We discovered that our noise-optimized profile does work well at 1.25 V or less, though.
Performance Benchmarks
We’ve already spent plenty of time benchmarking AMD's Tahiti GPU, so we didn't need to run many tests to know where Gigabyte's Super Overclock card places. Really, it's only necessary to see where the stock 1080 MHz clock rate lands, along with the overclocked frequency of 1250 MHz.
Once you exceed about 1100 MHz, overclocking yields diminishing returns. Performance continues to increase at higher clock rates, but the ratio between faster frame rates and power consumption drops, negating the reason to push any higher.
It makes sense that Gigabyte's Radeon HD 7970 Super Overclock has a stock GPU clock of 1080 MHz. The one reason to push up to 1250 or 1300 MHz is benchmark bragging rights. But the speed-up won't make much difference in real-world gaming.
FROM : http://www.tomshardware.com:
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