Preview: Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 SOC Windforce 5X

The 3-slot Windforce 5X has just completed a test run in our labs and we will be publishing a complete review shortly. We can already reveal that our reviewers were impressed by the effectiveness of the cooling solution that actively withdraws heat from the motherboard and guides directly to the outside of the case. Despite the increased power consumption of the card, which nears 300 watts under full load, but remains in the 200 to 225 watt range during gaming, the card does not burden the inside of a PC with greater heat dissipation.

After adjusting the card's vapor chamber, which originally had been developed for Gigabyte's GTX 680 card, our testers were able to increase the GPU clock of the Windforce 5X from 1080 MHz to 1300 MHz at 1.3 volts and the memory clock from 1375 MHz to 1500 MHz, using the 5x cooler solution of the card. The clock setting was enough to lift the 3DMark11 result in our test system to the top of the crop with a score of 3806, compared to a previous best of 3644 of the Galaxy/KFA2 GTX 680 EX OC at 1200 Mhz. 7970 SOC Windforce 5X topped the reference Radeon HD 7970 with a gain of about 13 percent.