Gigabyte’s Radeon HD 7970 Super Overclock is huge, heavy, overclocked, and very different-looking. Its Windforce 5X cooler employs five 40 mm fans. We benchmark the card, spend some time tweaking it, and measure the noise those blowers make.
Editor's Note: I don't want to spoil the end of today's story, but this card technically isn't available in the U.S. Instead, Gigabyte is selling the few it made in Europe and Asia, which works out well for our international audience. However, the company was kind enough to redirect one board to the States for the purpose of giving to a lucky Tom's Hardware reader. You're going to want to read through to the end of our coverage of the Radeon HD 7970 Super Overclock for your chance to win!
Apparently, there is still such thing as cool-looking and technically-impressive graphics cards. Take Gigabyte’s Radeon HD 7970 Super Overclock with Windforce 5X as an example. The company didn't necessarily reinvent the wheel here, but it did introduce a new idea in cooling. Contrary to what we’re accustomed to seeing from axial-flow fans that pollute the inside of a chassis with heated air or centrifugal fans that push exhaust out of an I/O bracket, this particular product sucks warm air away from PCB, pushing it up and out the side of a case.
Of course, in order for this to work, you need an enclosure with an opening on the side. That's going to be a difficult prerequisite for many enthusiasts to satisfy. But the advantage you get is that warm air doesn't recirculate and impact other components inside of the system.
Gigabyte's approach is interesting. Large-diameter fans naturally won't fit. And air needs to be sucked in across the entire length of the card. So, the Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 Super Overclock uses a quintet of 40 mm fans.
Today, we want to answer three questions about this new card: How loud is it? How warm does it run? And how does it perform?
At first, we were most afraid that five small fans cooling a large GPU were going to generate a ton of noise. Fortunately, that wasn't the case. But we still needed to make some modifications of our own before we were satisfied with the card's performance.
- Meet Gigabyte's Radeon HD 7970 Super Overclock
- Under The Radeon HD 7970 Super Overclock's Hood
- Gigabyte's Cooling Solution, Up Close
- Modifying Gigabyte's Windforce 5X Cooler
- In Video: Noise And Fan Speed Results
- In Video: Custom Fan Speed Profile And Stress Test
- Power Consumption And Gaming Performance
- Overclocking And Performance
- Operation In A Closed Case
- A Cool Radeon HD 7970 That You Can't Buy


And while good on Toms for reporting it why isnt the card tested as it comes from the factory so we know what to actually expect...
Honestly though if this card could be a little quieter it would be a great standard considering most people do still overclock with air coolers, and one thing bad for air coolers is a hot GPU blowing air towards the CPU.
lol
A lot of noise is a lot cheaper than going liquid cooling and as hot as it gets where I live you Need a really good cooling solution.
With that design, you can have 2 cards right next to each other and not have any cooling issues such as 1 card blocking the air intake of another card.
these cards run hot when just alone, a standard cooling design with a SLI or crossfire config where the back of one card is very close to the air intake of the other, can cause the second card to overheat, especially when overclocking.
(anyone remember 8800GTX and how it handled overclocking+ SLI)
A better solution will be some kind of duct work to have a single large fan located at the side of the card. Or better yet, a sealed liquid cooling solution. many quality cases will have space for 1 to 2 120mm fans on the side panel as well as 1-2 rear 120mm fans, there is more than enough space to add a few radiators.
Example - Gigabyte's GV-R797TO-3GD Radeon HD 7970 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125439
gsxrme the highest resolution is needed to stress these cards to the limit...anything lower is overkill for em
Yes and there are only 200 of these being sold in Europe/Asia so unless you combine it with some other 7970 (one that pollutes the inside of the case with hot air or one that makes a ton of noise blowing all its air out the back I/O) you aren't going to be using two of them in a multi-card setup. So the heat/noise you would have saved is lost to the 2nd card. Couple that for the need for a side panel for this card's exhaust (while most other video cards can use the side panel as an intake) and you'll have turbulent, inefficient and noisy airflow inside the case.
Not very smart to design a card for XFire that won't have enough availability to actually get two of them. For a card whose strength is multi-card setups, they sure didn't send Tom's two to test, you think with 200 cards available someone will manage to land two of them? Only 200 cards total? There's no shortage of 7970 GPUs - It's pretty clear that Gigabyte aborted this one somewhere along the way.
This card would be GREAT for Crossfire, I didn't think of it before but if they would make more cards designed like this it would make tight crossfire/SLi setups easier. Without the worry of the cards overheating due to bad airflow.
Try running OpenCL apps like Bitcoin/Litecoin mining apps. Try running OpenCL Raytracing. This card just plain sucks.
Now a Radeon 7970... that's a beast. At 1,300MHz it can produce over 850 Mhash/s using OpenCL/Java AES Decryption software. How does a GTX 680 fare? 90 Mhash/s (no joke).
Still waiting for this heatpipe fad to die out and copper coolers to hit the market again. Then we wouldn't have to worry about orientation of the heatsink, and no 90 deg C (194 deg f for us yanks) temps!
just my 2 cents.