
Gigabyte’s flagship Radeon HD 7970-based board employs a custom black PCB. Measuring 10.5” long, 4.75” tall, and 1.5” thick (not including the bezel), and weighing 1 lb 10.6 oz, this is the smallest and lightest card in our round-up. At press time, the GV-R797OC-3GD sells for an even $500 bucks on Newegg.

This card boasts a core clock of 1000 MHz core and memory running at 1375 MHz; that’s a 75 MHz GPU boost complemented by memory running at AMD's reference specification. Also like the reference model, Gigabyte's R797OC-3GD requires one six-pin and one eight-pin auxiliary power connector.

At first glance, this card's cooler appears to be fairly typical of what we've seen from Gigabyte in the past, with three 80 mm axial fans blowing over a trio of 8 mm heat pipes, all covered in a plastic shroud. The company claims that a new heat sink structure minimizes turbulence between the fans and provides better cooling efficiency. Of course, that sounds nice, but we need to put it through our test regimen in order to gauge the true improvement.

Gigabyte employs the same dual-link DVI, HDMI, and twin mini-DisplayPort outputs as AMD's reference design.

The company includes a CrossFire bridge, a DVI-to-VGA adapter, a dual four-pin Molex-to-six-pin power adapter, dual four-pin Molex-to-eight-pin power adapter, a driver disk, and a user guide.
Gigabyte covers the basics; however, we think that all Radeon HD 7970s should come with at least one mini-DisplayPort-to-DVI and one HDMI-to-DVI adapter for the folks interested in exploiting Eyefinity on the desktop. DisplayPort and HDMI are both less prevalent in that space.
Overclocking Gigabyte's R797OC-3GD
Gigabyte relies on AMD's Catalyst Control Center’s Overdrive feature for overclocking, though it enjoys an elevated 1200 MHz core and 1600 MHz memory limit.

MSI’s vendor-agnostic Afterburner software is even more generous in its ceilings, facilitating 1800 and 2475 MHz core and memory limits, with a voltage slider that tops out at 1.3 V.
We were able to stably overclock our sample to 1200 MHz and 1600 MHz for the core and memory, respectively, using a 1.25 V setting.
- AMD's Radeon HD 7970: More Affordable, More Available
- Gigabyte GV-R797OC-3GD
- HIS 7970 IceQ X2 Turbo And Turbo X
- MSI R7970 Lightning
- Sapphire HD 7970 OC
- VisionTek Radeon HD 7970
- Test System Setup And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark 11 And Crysis 2
- Benchmark Results: AvP And Metro 2033
- Overclocking AMD's Radeon HD 7970
- Power, Temperature, And Noise
- Five Radeon HD 7970s; One Rises To The Top
Lets hope the 680 GTX becomes available to see what price these AMD cards end up at. I like AMD and how they don't rebrand their cards like nVidia, but $20 cheaper than 680 GTX is not cheap enough to sway me that way.
i am impressed with HIS IceQ X2 Turbo X but still MSi lightning is my favorite.they have beefier VRMs,great cooling and are overclocking beasts.
$379 or $479??
$479.99 (USD) is more or less the cheapest price point for any Radeon 7970.
Let's see some typos:
In the 'Test System Setup And Benchmarks' page in the Operating System row it is written as Microsoft Windows 7 x6. I assume it's supposed to be x64.
In the first paragraph of the 'Sapphire HD 7970 OC' page the card is described as "HD 7970 PC".
I agree with your first and second choices ... well thought out.
I hope you guys do another one like this later on the Radeon 7870 since imo, that is the best 7000 series card in terms of price to performance. It's just a shame that there are no new nvidia cards to push the price of the 7800 series lower. Please include the MSI 7870 hawk and the asus direct cu card as well if you do make the review
Is the shiping + tax will drove the price to high, or the market is too small and HIS brand not strong enough in NA?
is that the only thing you like about AMD? Sad.
From lead-in
It would have been nice to toss-in a some GTX 680 benchmarks for comparison sake. Just reuse some of Chris's benchmarks -> http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-680-review-benchmark,3161.html or run your own.
Otherwise this is only a reference vs non-reverence HD 7970 article. You 'should' have been able to OC theses cards all the same and the difference should be within margin of error. No doubt effective cooling & Noise is a critical part, but I'm a little confused here -- I assume both Temps & Noise data is based on Factory (OC if applicable) settings which is fine BUT what about your OC Temps & Noise data?? To me this is critically important, what's the use in OC benchmarks if you need Jet rated earmuffs and temps that (exaggerating) to melt lead? Duh, I misread the data.
The HIS IceQ X2 Turbo (Turbo X) & MSI R7970 Lightning are the standouts with noise and temps with OC. Since I know how both noise & temps can change in a snap of a finger, both are fine. -- Thanks for that data!
Would have been cool to see one or two charts with all the cards overclocked vs a ref 680 just to see if highly overclocked 7970's can just about even the performance delta.
Two reasons:
- It's the sample Visiontek submitted
- Aside from that, it's great to see the lower-priced reference model represented