Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 OC 3GB Review

The SAPPHIRE HD 7970 OC 3GB GDDR5 graphics card is said to be one of the best AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics card on the market today.The SAPPHIRE HD 7970 OC 3GB stands out from the crowd with a factory overclock and a custom GPU cooler that looks awesome. This card doesn't have just one factory overclock though as SAPPHIRE loaded up two BIOS versions on this card and both feature different clock frequencies! The first offers a mild overclock of 950MHz on the core and 1425MHz on the memory and the other is more aggressive at 1000MHz on the core and 1450MHz on the memory. AMD just last week announced the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, but cards like the SAPPHIRE HD 7970 OC 3GB have already been running at or above the 1GHz mark for many months now

The Test System

 let's take a brief look at the test system that was used. All testing was done using a fresh install of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit and benchmarks were completed on the desktop with no other software programs running.
Drivers used for testing:

• Catalyst 12.7 Beta - Sapphire Radeon HD 7970
• Catalyst 12.4 WHQL - AMD Radeon HD 6990
• Catalyst 12.2 WHQL - MSI Radeon HD 7970
• GeForce 301.24 - GeForce GTX 680 & GeForce GTX 580
• GeForce 301.34 - GeForce GTX 690 & GeForce GTX 670

Batman: Arkham City uses the Unreal Engine 3 game engine with PhysX. For benchmark testing of Batman: Arkham City we disabled PhysX and ran the game in DirectX 11 mode with 8x MSAA enabled and all the image quality features cranked up.



Battlefield 3 (BF3) is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE and published by Electronic Arts.It does not support versions of Windows prior to Windows Vista as the game only supports DirectX 10 and 11.The game sold 5 million copies in its first week of release and the PC download is exclusive to EA's Origin platform, through which PC users also authenticate when connecting to the game.

 

Battlefield 3 debuts the new Frostbite 2 engine. This updated Frostbite engine can realistically portray the destruction of buildings and scenery to a greater extent than previous versions. Unlike previous iterations, the new version can also support dense urban areas. Battlefield 3 uses a new type of character animation technology called ANT. ANT technology is used in EA Sports games, such as FIFA, but for Battlefield 3 is adapted to create a more realistic soldier, with the ability to transition into cover and turn the head before the body.
This game looks great and we tested with the highest settings possible. This means we used 'ultra' settings and really punished the cards being tested. We ran FRAPS for two minutes on the single player map called 'Rock and a Hard Place' for benchmarking.

 

Metro 2033 is an action-oriented video game with a combination of survival horror and first-person shooter elements. The game is based on the novel Metro 2033 by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. It was developed by 4A Games in the Ukraine. The game is played from the perspective of a character named Artyom. The story takes place in post-apocalyptic Moscow, mostly inside the metro station but occasionally the player has to go above ground on certain missions and scavenge.

 

 

 

Temperature & Noise Testing

we want to take a closer look at how the graphics cards do at idle, during gaming and finally under a full load.

The TriXX utility allows for much higher clock speed adjustment since it has GPU voltage adjustment. We didn't play around with overclocking the memory, upped the voltage to 1287mV and was able to reach 1310MHz on the core clock speed!

 

This is the first time that we have been able to break 1300MHz on any AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics card and we have a good half a dozen of them here that we have been tinkering on. Our highest stable overclock was 1310MHz on the core clock and 1500MHz on the memory. This is an increase of 385MHz or 42% on the core clock! Not a bad overclock that was achieved by using a free overclocking utility and no physical mods or extreme cooling measures!

Final Thoughts & Conclusions

The SAPPHIRE HD 7970 OC 3GB Edition video card was designed for gamers and the benchmark results show that this card is perfect for serious gamers and performance enthusiasts. The AMD Radeon HD 7970 GPU has been available for six months now and these DirectX 11 graphics cards are still able to impress us each time we use one. SAPPHIRE was able to take this GPU to the next level by adding the Dual-X custom GPU cooler and placing a healthy factory overclock on this card. Those changes are what make this card so great!by nathan kirsch legit reviews.com