Last month at CES, we caught first glimpse that the Gigabyte Super Overclock AMD Radeon HD 7970 with the Windforce 5X cooling system. We've now the chance to take a closer look.
The most immediately noticeable customization with this graphics card is the massive cooler, which Gigabyte boasts uses an "anti-turbulance pull airflow system" that pulls air away from the system. Gigabyte says that if air were pushed inwards, the motherboard will block the flow of air. The cooler also draws air across the card, which the company says is superior to blowing directly towards the heatsink. The cooler is supposed to be quiet too and completely silent when under 30 degrees Celcius. We hope to verify this in our testing.
This impressive cooler allows the Radeon HD 7970 to be clocked to 1080 MHz, up from the standard 925 MHz. Gigabyte points to a 14 percent performance improvement over a stock Radeon HD 7970 when considering the numbers from 3DMark 11 Extreme mode. That cooler has also made things quieter by 9.2 decibels and 18 percent cooler than the stock fan when running full tilt on Futuremark.
This Gigabyte product also features the company's Extreme Dual BIOS technology. One BIOS is the default with standard settings, while the other one is called the LN2 BIOS for extreme overclockers who want to avoid cold bug issues.
We're working on one of these in our labs right now, so stay tuned for our in-depth look at this premium graphics card.
