We're not going to recommend against buying a card with AMD's reference cooler without trying to come up with alternatives.
Considering that our sample spun up to 84 degrees C in an air-conditioned room in a relatively modest looping test that doesn't apply a constant load, we don't even want to know how it'd sound (or perform) during an extended gaming session.
The following chart shows the temperature curve of our reference card running a far more demanding FurMark workload at four different clock speeds over a period of four minutes.

Regardless of how noisy AMD's solution is, can an aftermarket card ameliorate this thermal situation? We decided to go with a cooler in the $50 range, which still ends up pricey when you add it to the card's $500 cost. Spending anything more just to counter a problem with the reference design, we think, is wasteful.
Is Gelid's Icy Vision-A A Good Compromise Between Performance And Price?
Gelid’s Icy Vision isn’t really a particularly new design, but it's now officially validated for the Radeon HD 7970. How well does it handle almost 250 W of heat dissipation under full load?
After we finished installing the new cooler, we re-ran our tests and compared the results to AMD’s reference design.

Gelid’s Icy Vision-A doesn't deliver the same cooling efficiency as what we've seen from companies like MSI, HIS, or Gigabyte, but the improvement is both quantifiable in the above chart, and in our acoustic testing. In light of its moderate price, we believe this cooler is a reasonable choice that helps complement AMD's hardware. This is the treatment we're hoping to see from board partners.

Of course, the bars on a chart don’t really tell you much about the actual noise a specific cooler produces. That’s where our videos come in, allowing our readers to compare both cooling solutions directly.
First, our Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition with Gelid's Icy Vision-A:
Then, our Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition with AMD's reference cooler:
What a difference. The bottom line is that $50 bucks absolutely gets you a better cooling solution. In our opinion, you're better off saving the $50 AMD is trying to make on its GHz Edition card. Instead, buy the original Radeon HD 7970 and spend the leftover money on a cooler like this. You'll achieve similar performance at a similar price, but get less noise and better thermals. The only sacrifice is a loss of warranty.
- Is An Overclocked Radeon HD 7970 Greater Than GeForce GTX 680?
- PowerTune With Boost: Is The Accelerator Stuck?
- Radeon HD 7970 Vs. Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition
- Overclocking With PowerTune
- Will Your Old 7970 Take A GHz Edition Firmware?
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark 11
- Benchmark Results: Battlefield 3 (DX 11)
- Benchmark Results: Crysis 2 (DX 9/11)
- Benchmark Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (DX 9)
- Benchmark Results: DiRT 3 (DX 11)
- Benchmark Results: World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm (DX 11)
- Benchmark Results: Metro 2033 (DX 11)
- Benchmark Results: GPU Compute
- Benchmark Results: MediaConverter 7.5
- Temperature And Noise
- Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Gets Our Aftermarket Cooling Treatment
- Power Consumption
- New Drivers Deliver; Radeon HD 7970 Claims A Symbolic Win



And for the gamers: take a look at the new UT4 engine! Without excellent GPGPU performace this will be a disaster for each graphics card. See you, Nvidia.
the issue is them rethinking their future designs scares me... Nvidia has started a HORRIBLE trend in the business that I hope to dear god AMD does not follow suite. True, Nvidia is able to produce more gaming performance for less, but this is pushing anyone who wants GPU compute to get an overpriced professional card. now before you say "well if you're making a living out of it, fork out the cash and go Quadro", let me remind you that a lot of innovators in various fields actually do use GPU compute to ultimately make progress (especially in academic sciences) to ultimately bring us better tech AND new directions in tech development... and I for one know a lot of government funded labs that can't afford to buy a stack of quadro cards
now if only you could bold it
with Winzip that does not use GPU, VCE that slows down video encoding and a card that gives lower min FPS..... EPIC FAIL.
or before releasing your products, try to ensure S/W compatibility.
the issue is them rethinking their future designs scares me... Nvidia has started a HORRIBLE trend in the business that I hope to dear god AMD does not follow suite. True, Nvidia is able to produce more gaming performance for less, but this is pushing anyone who wants GPU compute to get an overpriced professional card. now before you say "well if you're making a living out of it, fork out the cash and go Quadro", let me remind you that a lot of innovators in various fields actually do use GPU compute to ultimately make progress (especially in academic sciences) to ultimately bring us better tech AND new directions in tech development... and I for one know a lot of government funded labs that can't afford to buy a stack of quadro cards
And for the gamers: take a look at the new UT4 engine! Without excellent GPGPU performace this will be a disaster for each graphics card. See you, Nvidia.
;-)
Excellent tip. Told you I'd look into it!
WoW is meaningful, actually.
New games will make it in when vendors start giving us more than two or three days to retest all of their graphics cards
And here's me, hoping that this kind of competition landscape would still be present in the enthusiast CPU market.
I really hope this is trolling, rather than a calous endeavor to discredit a competitors product.