The most noticeable difference on Gigabyte’s HD 7970 is the custom cooler, with three fans and a nice shroud, which should keep this card cool and quiet. This is a good thing as the card sports a moderate overclock of 1000MHz on the core though the memory remains at stock speeds. It doesn’t need to stay at that speed however, [H]ard|OCP got the card up to 1305MHz for the core and 1605MHz for the memory, 6.42GHz effective. That overclock is quite noticeable in games over both the GTX580 and the stock HD7970 though the performance comes at a price as the card pulls over 100W more than the stock card at full load. For those drooling over the performance remember that these cards are intended to power multiple screens; [H] tested at 2560 x 1600 and if your setup is not of that resolution or higher you are tossing away money at a product you will not be using to its full potential.
"GIGABYTE has a custom cooled and overclocked version of the Radeon HD 7970. We examine how well GIGABYTE’s Windforce 3X cooling technology allows us to overclock this next generation video card. Find out how this GIGABYTE GV-R797OC-3GD monster compares to a GeForce GTX 580, a Radeon HD 6970, and reference HD 7970."
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