Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 OC 3GB Graphics Card Review

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