Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 OC 3GB Graphics Card Review

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Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 OC 3GB Graphics Card Review - eTeknix

The 7970 has been a big hit for AMD with a not so successful launch at first due to stock but as things progressed, we’ve seen more cards being greeted into the retail and media channels. It’s all very nice when we see the same reference cards from different manufacturers incorporating a different sticker, but it doesn’t really get our blood flowing so to speak. We much prefer to see something from a manufacturer that offers that unique wow factor, such as a custom cooler or a pre-overclocked card or even better yet, both and we all know that Gigabyte aim to please when it comes to their graphics cards.
While we saw some manufacturers beating the rest to the post by offering a slightly custom design at launch, Gigabyte decided to wait that little bit extra so that things could be fine-tuned and refined to get the best results possible, and that is a tried and tested method from the past when it comes to Gigabyte cards.
So what we have today is the Radeon HD 7970 OC from Gigabyte offering up a tasty looking card with their patented WindForce cooler offering up to 15% cooler performance compared to a reference design, but not letting Gigabyte end it there, they are also offering a overclock straight from their factory at 1000MHz or in the real-world; 1GHz.
As always, we’ll take a look at the packaging and bundle that comes with the card, and then get straight in to looking at the card itself and how it can compare against a stock reference 7970 in terms of performance, while also taking a good look at the power, acoustics and heat management that their famous WindForce cooler can cope with.
Specifications

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Taking a look at the front of the packaging, we can see that things are very simple with some distinct branding and memory size of 3GB. Main keypoints on this box are the 1000MHz overclock value and the WindForce cooler that allows for 15% cooler temperatures.



The rear of the box gives a lot more information on the WindForce cooler and how it’s designed to give better results over a reference design. The main features are also listed as well as the functionality of having PCI-Express 3.0 and being made from 28nm technology.



Inside we receive quite a simple bundle of accessories, with a quick guide, driver utility CD, twin Molex to PCI-Express 6-pin adapter, twin Molex to PCI-Express 8-pin adapter and a small CrossFire bridge for those wanting some multi-GPU action.

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The card is typical of what we’ve seen from Gigabyte with their patented WindForce cooler though slightly different to their Super Overclock edition cooler which incorporates a brushed metal effect shrouding. The Overclock models, much like this one include a plastic shrouding but still incorporate a triple fan design. The cooler encompasses the whole of the card from top to bottom, and from front to back to give the best possible surface contact and heat dissipation across the card.



The triple fan design incorporates three PWM style Gigabyte branded fans with a light smoked translucent design. Though the cooler may look quite large, it only takes up two slots inside your chassis and the cooler doesn’t extend past the width of the two expansion slots.



Power wise we find a single 6-pin and single 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors allowing the card to pull a quoted maximum wattage of 210 watts meaning that a good branded 550/600w power supply should be sufficient to run this card.



Before we talk about the CrossFire capabilities, we though that it was worth mentioning the big metal bar that sits across the top of the card. Countless cards on the market are fitted with large coolers which leads to the card bending towards its far end. This bracket that Gigabyte have fitted allows for extra stability across the vital part of the cards PCB allowing for a longer life and improved durability which as we know, is what Gigabyte stand for. Back to looking at the CrossFire connectors, we can see two connectors allowing for two, three and even four cards in a multi-GPU configuration.

You may also notice the tiny switch to the left which is numbered 1 and 2, which allows you to select between the two BIOS versions, of which option 2 puts the card to its factory default settings.



Connectivity wise we see a nice variety of connectors allowing large resolution high-definition displays through use of a dual-link DVI port, HDMI or two mini DisplayPort connectors.



Taking a look at GPU-Z, we can see a speed of 1000MHz on the GPU clock, compared to a stock speed of 925MHz on a reference card. The memory is left at stock speeds of 1375MHz, as leaving the whopping 3GB of memory at stock speeds can’t be justified to be overclocked, and instead Gigabyte believe that simply overclocking the GPU clock is sufficient, but we shall put that to the test.

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The test the performance of this card, we use the latest drivers direct from the manufacturer and run each test three times to obtain a fair average set of results.

Test System:

Asus Maximus IV Extreme-Z
Intel Core i7 2700k
16GB Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz
Corsair H80
Corsair HX1050W
Kingston V+ 100 128GB SSD
Lian Li T60
3 x AOC E2795VH

We would like to thank AOC, Asus, Corsair, Kingston, and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components.

Games used:

Aliens Vs Predator
Dirt 3
F1 2011
Batman: Arkham City
Mafia II
Metro 2033

Hardware used:

Plug-in electricity usage monitor
Sound level meter

Software used:

3DMark 11
HWMonitor
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

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3DMark 11 is the latest offering from Futuremark, taking full advantage of DirectX 11 by utilising tessellation features and volumetric lighting. It takes your graphics and CPU hardware to the edge to simulate the most extreme conditions whilst working as a stand point to compare results with other users online.



As we start our tests, we look at 3DMark11 and how the card performs against other similar cards, including a reference 7970, which straight away we can see that the overclock really did help push this card ahead of the competition.

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Heaven 2.5 is regarded to be one of the most intensive Benchmarking utilities about at the moment along with the likes of 3DMark. It makes use of highly comprehensive tessellation technology, advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) and a highly defined light algorithm to produce ever changing light conditions amongst other items.



Heaven was a very similar story, mainly at lower resolutions, whereas Eyefinity results were marginal between the stock reference card and this overclock edition card from Gigabyte.

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Aliens Vs Predator is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game that relies on DirectX 11 and high amounts of Tessellation in conjunction to give enhanced shadows and fantastic textures to the surrounds and characters within the game.



In Aliens Vs Predator, this card really showed that it means business, and shot up in frames across all resolutions with a 10FPS boost at 1680×1050 when compared with a reference 7970. Even at 1920×1080 we saw almost 10FPS again which is impressive to say the least.

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Dirt 3 was released in May 2011 and is the third in the Dirt series offering a complete overhaul in terms of graphics for the DirectX 11 platform which extreme lighting effects and reflections as well as showcasing fast moving graphics and using in game physics to bring the most extreme quality in terms of video rendering.



Dirt 3 was a very similar story with around 10FPS increases on both 1920×1080 and 1680×1050 resolutions. Eyefinity still saw a small increase with this overclock edition graphics card.

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F1 2011 is the latest instalment from Codemasters and is based upon the 2011 Formula One season. It utilises the latest DirectX 11 features including shadows, particles and reflections to offer the very best graphics in a fast-paced moving game with depth of field being a key focus. It relies heavily on all aspects of a computer system including GPU and CPU.



F1 2011 didn’t show as high of an increase as the previous benchmarks when looking at single resolutions, though a larger increase at Eyefinity was seen with a stonking 8FPS over a standard 7970 reference card from AMD.

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Batman: Arkham City was release late in 2011 as a sequal to Arkham Asylum. The game uses large scale mapping with heavy effects on lighting and the environment along with a lot of tessellation in a fast moving gaming scene. It utilises DirectX 11 for shadows, lighting, reflections and particles to give the best gaming experience possible.



Batman showed some interesting results, even once run several times as the overclock edition card gave worse results than the reference card, but we put this down to the game opposed to the card as we still believe that the DX11 aspects of this game are still very sketchy and quite buggy.