Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 3GB Vapor-X Video Card Review

[Apoptosis]

Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 3GB Vapor-X Video Card Review

The SAPPHIRE HD 7970 3GB OC Vapor-X Edition has a core clock speed of 1050 MHz and 3GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 6000MHz (effective). We put this custom card to the test to see how it performs in the games and how well it can overclock. With a healthy factory overclock and the Vapor-X cooler this card should perform well, but you never know unless you try it out!

The Sapphire HD 7970 Vapor-X 3GB video card is the fastest card offered by Sapphire and it shows just how much performance you can get from AMD's top of the line GPU. The card is impressive, but it better be for $449.99 shipped after rebate. For this kind of money it better perform exceptionally well and for the most part the Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 Vapor-X did just that. After looking at all the performance tests that we completed the Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 Vapor-X was significantly faster than the Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 Vapor-X, but was basically even with the factory overclocked NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 video card that we compared it against.

Article Title: Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 3GB Vapor-X Video Card Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/2058/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $449.99 Shipped

[BONEBREAKING]

Does this card now support PhysX? Does this matter?

[Apoptosis]

PhysX only runs on NVIDIA cards, but HAVOK and other physics engines run on AMD Radeon HD cards just fine.

Does it matter... Yes, if you want PhysX effects in the game titles have them.

[BONEBREAKING]

Was the card compared with the geforce Physx on? The hardocp review pointed out that this was a big impact on the geforce.

[Apoptosis]

We installed the drivers and left all the settings at default.

All the game settings used were shown in the charts. For example in Borderlands 2 PhysX was set to low (you can't turn it off in the game).

[INeedAFnSuffix]

I just found this benchmark and wow ... what a shocker. And boy am i late.
I never knew the 7970 pre-Never Settle or 13.1 was already faster than a ASUS 680 TOP, of which costs 859$ here! And the Dual-X OC at a moderate 567$ which is excellent value ...