![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Monday , January 09, 2012
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
GIGABYTE Radeon HD 7970 OC Exclusive First Look
An early first look at a custom built Radeon HD 7970 based video card. The GIGABYT E GV-R7970C-3GD sports a custom design, custom heatsink, and a custom fan all with an out-of-box 1GHz GPU frequency. The future of Radeon HD 7970 based video cards is looking good.
Introduction
We've got an exclusive first look at GIGABYTE's upcoming customized Radeon HD 7970 video card, the GV-R7970C-3GD. The GIGABYTE GV-RV7970OC-3GD has been customized by GIGABYTE from the printed circuit board, to the heatsink and fan unit, to the out-of-box overclock. We've been waiting to get our hands on non-reference Radeon HD 7970 video cards, and this one looks to not dissappoint. We also have a customized XFX Radeon HD 7970 on its way, and an ASUS Radeon HD 7970, which we will have full evaluations on soon.
GIGABYTE Radeon HD 7970
GIGABYTE has overclocked the Radeon HD 7970 from 925MHz to 1000MHz (1GHz) out of the box. While this overclock is a bit tame for the Radeon HD 7970 GPU, it should give you a slight boost to performance compared to standard Radeon HD 7970's with no effort on your part. From our overclock testing, we know the Radeon HD 7970 is capable of going a lot higher, so we look forward to overclocking this video card since it has custom cooling.
GIGABYTE is using what it dubs the "Windforce 3X" cooling design with "Triangle Cool" technology. It's a lot of fancy wording that basically means there are custom fans and a custom heatsink. The heatsink itself is aluminum with three 8mm copper heatpipes, and is sectioned into three units. The RAM also has a heatsink in place which makes direct contact with the primary heatsink, meaning the RAM is actively air cooled as well. It is nice to see this feature, we don't see actively cooled memory on a video card very often these days.
The fins of the heatsinks are an interesting feature on this video card. Instead of flat heatsink fins GIGABYTE has changed the structure of the fins by adding a clip down the center which forms a somewhat triangle shape, which GIGABYTE states will increase heat transfer and minimize air turbulence. This is only on the primary heatsink right atop the GPU however.
As we mentioned, the video card is overclocked to 1GHz. The memory remains at the reference clock speed of 5.5GHz. Since GIGABYTE has focused heavily on the customized cooling of this video card we can't wait to see what overclocking potential this video card has.
Pictures
We have the first sample of this GIGABYTE video card, and as such we don't have the final retail packing yet to show you, just the video card. The PCB on our video card is actually black, unlike the blue one shown in the presentation above. There are three heatsinks, connected with heatpipes, with the triangle core on the center heatsink, and three large fans to keep these all cool.
Performance
We did some out-of-box apples to apples performance testing to see how the GIGABYTE Radeon HD 7970 compares to a reference Radeon HD 7970.
The GIGABYTE Radeon HD 7970 GV-R7970C-3GD running at 1GHz was consistently faster than the Radeon HD 7970 at stock speeds.
Temperatures
We did a full in-game temperature test at full load on the new GIGABYTE HD 7970, the results are below. There is a ignificant thermal improvement with the GIGABYTE 7970 configuration when compared to the reference card. The "stock" Radeon HD 7970 was already doing well with its stock heatsink and fan, but with Gigabyte’s custom heatsink and fan the 7970 is taken to another level in terms of performing temperatures.
AMD Radeon HD 7970 Reference - 81c @ 47% fan speed
GIGABYTE Radeon HD 7970 GV-R7970C-3GD - 72c @ 33% fan speed
This is just a preview of things to come, we will be doing a full evaluation of this video card, look for that to come. What kind of overclocking potential might we see out of this video card? If our overclocking Radeon HD 7970 review is anything to go by (which will be published today), and the full load temperature experienced above, only good things.