Sapphire HD 7970 Dual X Review

BluePanda - June 12, 2012
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Testing:

Testing of the Sapphire HD 7970 will consist of running it and comparison cards through the OverclockersClub.com suite of games and synthetic benchmarks. This will test the performance against many popular competitors. Comparisons will be made to cards of a range of capabilities to show where each card falls on the performance ladder. The games used are some of today's newest and most popular titles, which should be able to provide an idea of how the cards perform relative to each other.

The system specifications will remain the same throughout the testing. No adjustment will be made to the respective control panels during the testing, with the exception of the 3DMark 11 testing, where PhysX will be disabled in the NVIDIA Control Panel, if applicable. I will first test the cards at stock speeds, and then overclocked to see the effects of an increase in clock speed. The cards will be placed in order from highest to lowest performance in each graph to show where they fall by comparison. The latest press release driver will be used in testing of the Sapphire HD 7970. Other NVIDIA comparison cards will be using the 296.10 drivers; AMD will be using Catalyst 12.4 drivers.

Testing Rig:

Processor: Core i7 2600K @ 4.4 GHz 100 x 44
CPU Cooling: Custom Water Cooling with Swiftech and Dangerden Parts
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z68AP-D3
Memory: Mushkin 991996 Redline PC3-17000 9-11-10-28 8 GB
Video Card: Sapphire HD 7970 Dual X
Power Supply: Corsair AX1200
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: Lite-On Blu-Ray
Case: Corsair Graphite Series 600T
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Sapphire HD 7970 3GB – Core 1125MHz, Memory 1575MHz

Maximum Clock Speeds:

Testing for the maximum clock speed consists of looping Unigine 3.0 for 30 minutes each to see where the clock speeds fail when pushed. If the clock speed adjustment fails, then the clock speeds and tests are rerun until they pass a full hour of testing.