7970 decision.. help please.

jwl24

Honorable
Feb 8, 2013
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10,510
As the title states, I'm looking for the fastest, top of the line 7970 card.
There's so many different ones out there, I've read all the reviews, and what not but still haven't been able to determine which card actually takes the lead..

I'm hoping that posting here, I can get some help in determining the outcome. From what I've read and everything, it seems possibly... that these few are the top cards for 7970 edition cards?

Of course I'm assuming the Ghz edition cards are always faster than the non, but this is including overclocking, etc.

From what I put together, a couple of the cards that I figure in the line up are:

MSI Lightning 7970
Asus Matrix Platinum 7970
Sapphire Vapor X 7970
....?

Any others that would beat these cards, and take the lead would be greatly appreciated. Hope some folks can give me feedback, can't decide on what card to actually get.
I know the Titan beats the single card, but I can't justify the price (if i was to xfire, around $800, rather than just $1k for a single card), and from what I know the 7970 ghz edition single cards, beat the current nivida single cards (exception of titan)
 
to date, I still think the 7970 lightning is the best, most well thought out 7970 build. the sapphire vapor X is really nice and can catch the 7970 lightning in performance, but I don't like that it's 2.5 slots rather than 2 slots.

the asus matrix performs similar to the 7970 at an even higher cost... so I don't think it's worth it
 
Go and get Sapphire HD 7970 Dual-X. They are awesome and are going cheap right now. So you can easily CF those 2. MSI Lightning is expensive and so it the Matrix. It depends on where you but here in Canada, Sapphire HD7970 go for 394.99 after $15 rebate. I got 2 and they are awesome. So browse around and make your choice. But my vote is for Sapphire cards. Look at the bottom of this reply and you can see what I got from OC the 2 cards. I had them running around 1200/1700 all day and they never crashed once no get too hot past 65 degrees Celsius. Now I took them down to 1.1GHz. They are sexy, cool and quiet!