Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 OC WindForce review - Introduction

AMD recently launched their 28nm GPUs, the result is obviously the 7000 series product. All the way on top is the 7900 series, armed with a GPU codenamed Tahiti, the release of which was received quite positively on the market.

Today in the spotlight we have Gigabyte, they are releasing customized 7900 models. Specifically today we will test the Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 OC (WindForce) edition. It's a fully fledged R7970 on a customized PCB, it comes factory overclocked for you and next to that they applied their popular WindForce cooler, the one that has a cool number of three active fans. The results are pretty impressive as you'll find out, that factory overclock boils down to a default clock frequency of 1000 MHz on the GPU core. Next to that the WindForce cooler is able to keep the product under 65 Degrees C, and that's under full load and stress.

Injected in the 499 EUR / 549 USD segment the product isn't cheap though,  it will have to compete directly with the GeForce GTX 580, and obviously will do so righteously. The results that you'll witness today will not sadden you. Where it matters (the latest and newer games) the Radeon HD 7970 will be a good 20%, 30% sometimes even 40% faster than the competition, and in the world of enthusiast graphics performance that brings a smile to our face.

So have a peek at the Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 OC review, a product with very nice game performance, a great feature set and a frame buffer that will pop your eyes out as yeah the graphics card has a cool 3GB GDDR5 graphics memory as well.

Let's have a look at this Southern Island GPU family member under the codename "Tahiti". Head over to the next page where we'll startup the technology overview first.