Sapphire HD 7970 Pro Reviews

The SAPPHIRE HD 7970 OC 3GB video card gave us a look at the full potential of the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GPU and we liked what we saw!

The most powerful single-core graphics card available, but you'll have to be a dedicated gamer to justify the high price.

Getting the obvious statements out of the way first, the Radeon HD 7970 3GB is the fastest single-GPU graphics card on the market. The first run of partner cards are likely to be reference models based on a solid design. But potential purchasers need to be wary of overkill. The Radeon HD 7970 is capable of smoothly running practically any game at a 1080p resolution with extreme image-quality settings, but if you play at these settings, a lesser card may well do the trick. The Radeon's visceral power is exposed when upping the ante by using three full-HD screens in an Eyefinity 3 configuration. This 5,760x1,080 resolution arrangement taxes every part of the GPU's silicon anatomy, and it's where the HD 7970 shines, relatively speaking. Compared across three generations of high-end Radeons - HD 5870 through to HD 7970 - the latest card in AMD's arsenal makes more sense as the driver of three-screen gaming, where lots of innate horsepower and generous memory bandwidth generally serve up playable frame-rates with the utmost IQ.

When you get down to it in the end what we all want from a new release is to see it out perform not only the prior generation parts it replaces but the competitors best part in its class. The Sapphire HD 7970 does that in spades as the saying goes. It delivers performance well above that of the Northern Islands Cayman based HD 6970 as well as Nvidia's GTX 580 in just about every game tested (HAWX 2 not withstanding). This is what you want as a successor to a good product and AMD and its partners have delivered. Not only is the gaming performance at stock speeds impressive, but the overclocking headroom makes it that much more appealing from a performance perspective. And it should get better from here. I was easily able to increase both the GPU core clock and memory clock speeds to the limits of AMD's Catalyst Control Center at 1125MHz on the core and 1575MHz on the GDDR5 memory, both increases of 200Mhz without any effort at all. By doing so the performance in games scaled upward significantly in most cases. This added performance drives the ability to use just a single card to run an Eyefinity gaming setup at resolutions up to 5760 x 1080 with the eye candy turned on. A wider field of view makes for a more immersive gaming experience. With the HD 7970 it's possible not probable. A new wrinkle with the new architecture is Eyefinity 2.0 that offers a host of improvements including individual media streams for each output, new 5x1 monitor configurations, 16kx16k configurations, bezel correction, and new task bar positioning.