Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 Super Overclock: Now With Windforce 5X

[jase240]

[citation][nom]funguseater[/nom]Ha Ha, haven't used any Deltas eh? 120mm fan with 250CFM and yeah its a little loud... but NOTHING cools a serious OC better.[/citation]

120mm fan is a good size for a GPU fan, most use smaller fans than that. 250CFM? Does it still hold up that CFM rating when against a radiator/heatsink?

 

[zloginet]

[citation][nom]gsxrme[/nom]Water cooling is truly the only option for really overclocking. Those fans are way to noisy. I wish toms had a 1300Mhz GTX680 listed because my factory ASUS reference board even hits 1300Mhz Core / 6750Mhz Ram with no mods or voltage tweaks. I don't see this as a breakthrough and with the cost of 2500 res monitors less than 1% of the market are running that high.[/citation]

Prove that stable without voltage... I smell major BS

 

[zloginet]

[citation][nom]jase240[/nom]120mm fan is a good size for a GPU fan, most use smaller fans than that. 250CFM? Does it still hold up that CFM rating when against a radiator/heatsink?[/citation]

I only pay attention to static pressure when using radiators and heatsinks...

 

[funguseater]

[citation][nom]jase240[/nom]120mm fan is a good size for a GPU fan, most use smaller fans than that. 250CFM? Does it still hold up that CFM rating when against a radiator/heatsink?[/citation]


Yeah they are industrial fans, you'll find em on freezers/air conditioners but they draw a lot of current, usually need a custom fan controller and they are LOUD. You can find em at Frozen CPU for WC Loops.

 

[funguseater]

[citation][nom]zloginet[/nom]I only pay attention to static pressure when using radiators and heatsinks...[/citation]

http://www.sidewindercomputers.com/de12pfexhisp.html Delta Fan 120mmx38mm

252CFM
35.887 mm H2O Static !!!
69 decibal LOUD

Best rad fans there are.... now my trolling is done.

 

[jase240]

[citation][nom]zloginet[/nom]Prove that stable without voltage... I smell major BS[/citation]


My Asus Direct CUII Top GTX 670 hits over 1200+Mhz on factory settings, I'm sure it could easily overclock past 1300Mhz even without a power boost. And at that note I'm sure a 680 could overclock that high too, Nvidia did pretty good with the 600 series.

But I do agree at full load it would probably need more juice to be stable.

 

[nforce4max]

[citation][nom]ElMoIsEviL[/nom]Oh boy... why do people always mention the nVIDIA GTX 680. It is a good Gaming card but HORRIBLE for compute. It sucks so much that a GTX 285 can compete with it in that domain.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).[/citation]

Performance per unit and per clock Kepler truly sucks compared to past generations. One more reason to hang onto older Nvidia cards

 

[unksol]

[citation][nom]pezonator[/nom]Lol, this card is available in Australia for $519, the OC version is $499 and the Ghz edition is $529. I would have thought this would be more expensive than the Ghz edition, but given the lower clocks, I suppose it makes sense. The cheapest 7970 is a stock reference model from HIS for $469 followed by reference Sapphire at $479. Not sure if my 670 FTW was worth the $529....[/citation]

You have to keep in mind gigabye is using a 670 cooler that does not contact some of the chips on the 7970, a rediculous thermal pad soloution you need to remove and void your warranty, bad TIM, crappy fans/cooling, and a low clock compared to other cards.

All that with high temps.

Gigabyte made a bad card as usal. "superclocked" is a joke with its very low clocks. Using a cooler not designed for this board, crap pads and TIM you have to void your waranty to fix, and on top of that LOOSE SCREWS is insane. this is a top teir card..... made like crap. At this price these issues should be a joke...but they are not.

 

[mrcapncaveman]

Personally I would love to get my hands on this card. Great review.

 

[falchard]

Ha Ha, haven't used any Deltas eh? 120mm fan with 250CFM and yeah its a little loud... but NOTHING cools a serious OC better.

I got 2 deltas. I like how long they last despite having a super high cfm. One of mine just died after 3 years. However, I needed to put in a fan controller because it sounded like I had an airstripe in my room. My neighbors complained. However, what I mentioned was the comparison of a large low rpm fam verse a small high rpm fan. My delta's are 90mm, not on the small side. Ofcourse if you increase the rpm it will bring in more air, but area taken up is also important. The tiny fans on this Gigabyte GPU won't pull in much.

 

[sarinaide]

GK104 unleashed the true potential of GCN, when it was released it was terribly sandbagged, I guess it was AMD's way of seeing or maybe forcing Nvidia's hand. Catalyst 12.6 and 12.7 have also changed a lot. All in all whether green or red you are getting fantastic cards today, its becoming impossible to recommend Fermi or VLIW4 to anyone now.

 

[hegelund]

is the radeon 7970 newer than the nvidia gtx 690 ?? sry for off-topic maybe

 

[sarinaide]

No its older

 

[horaciopz]

I love how toms is adding videos to show noise measures... Awesome review and work ! And about this card.. well if someone wants something different, special and weird... thats proves not to be as efective as mainstream cooling solutions from other mayor brands as Direct CU II Top or Vapor X, this is the best choice, sad that it is not available in US....

The lucky winner that get this card will say "OMFG I WON THE ONLY CARD IN THE US WITH THIS COOLING " And probably take a bunch a pictures, then sell it on ebay in a ridiculous price or take the off the heatsink and wattercool it Lol !

 

[draphius]

[citation][nom]IJustwanttoPost25[/nom]Once again, another heat pipe design where the heat pipes are UPSIDE DOWN! So, all the refrigerant just sits at the end of the heat pipes and doesn't go anywhere. Do companies even think anymore before they design this garbage? I bet if Toms were to turn the case upside down (so the refrigerant actually falls to the correct area), the windforce 5x would cool a lot better than 90 deg. C.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.[/citation]
actually the capillary action is plenty strong to work in any orientation. do a quick wiki and it will al become clear. i do agree that this heatpipe fad needs to die, but i also think all air coling needs to die. after watching every single one of this videos i remember exactly why i put full cover blocks on my gpus, 1- they never go above 43c even with the voltage maxed out and heavily overclocked 2- i dont have to listen to a leaf blower all day long

 

[WyomingKnott]

[citation][nom]nforce4max[/nom]This card isn't meant for the chickens that want cards to mostly silent but is for those who are much more aggressive in overclocking while being more forgiving when it comes to noise. [/citation]
Buk buk buk! Not all of us live solely for bragging or fragging (that is, bragging rights for highest FPS or killing the most opponents in games). There are other uses for computers.

My personal build is optimized for quiet, so I can work without background noise, or while listening to high-quality music. I may very well have spent as much time in the last year auditioning headphones and other equipment as you have tweaking frame rates. Just a question of different priorities. There are probably people all over the spectrum with you on one end and a studio recording engineer on the other.

 

[spaceman123]

So wait, does the heat blow onto the motherboard? Do the fans push or pull? Depending upon your case this could screw with your airflow, Like a Corsair 500R, Where would the heated air go? You'd have to reverse the large 200mm fan.

 

[Guest]

"actually the capillary action is plenty strong to work in any orientation. do a quick wiki and it will al become clear. i do agree that this heatpipe fad needs to die, but i also think all air coling needs to die. after watching every single one of this videos i remember exactly why i put full cover blocks on my gpus, 1- they never go above 43c even with the voltage maxed out and heavily overclocked 2- i dont have to listen to a leaf blower all day long"

From Wiki;
" The liquid then returns to the hot interface through either capillary action or "gravity" action where it evaporates once more and repeats the cycle"

I've worked with heat pipes since they came out, and I know for a fact the "capillary" action does not work very well, and the heatpipe must be horizontal at the very least in order for it to work. The heat pipes in on this heatsink make a 90 deg turn downward, this causes the refrigerant to literally sit at the top (bottom) on the heat pipe inside the fins. Most manufactures place waring labels on heatpipe heatsinks stating that they must remain horizontal, or ideally vertical in order to function properly. Remember there is no pump in a heat pipe to transfer the refrigerant to the thermal contact point so it has to flow back down.

I agree, water cooling is pretty awesome, but a little pricey for my tastes. A simple slab of (1/8, 1/4 inch) copper with lots of fins(transfer area) and a decent 80mm, or 120mm fan will have much better performance than this monstrosity of a heatsink. I even DARE Tom's to turn the case upside down and re-test this beast and see if the results differ. I mean come on, you want to show-up a no-name poster right? Then do it, I dare Tom's to prove me wrong.

 

[v3numb]

All the money spent to quiet the fans and have a slient PC to then put this video card in?...hmmm

 

[mubin]

I am in the Asia, but dont even get a chance to get a hand on that. Only 200!!!

 

[tychoblu]

Would love to win this card and mod my Storm Scout case with plexi for optimal exhaust.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]nforce4max[/nom]Performance per unit and per clock Kepler truly sucks compared to past generations. One more reason to hang onto older Nvidia cards[/citation]

If by performance per unit you mean performance per core, then that doesn't matter. Performance per clock is subjective o core count among many other things and is not something that you can measure the GPU by very accurately. You complain about things that are very difficult to compare The problem with Kepler in compute is that the cores don't support higher than single-precision (32 bit) floating point math. There is a small number of FP-64 cores that do support it and the fact that there are so few in the GK10x series of GPUs is why they suck so much at dual-precision (64-bit) floating-point math. However, for what they do work well with, single-precision, they are much faster than the older Nvidia cards and the older AMD cards, but still lose to the GCN GPUs in single-precision.

For dual-precision, Nvidia relies on their Tesla/Quadro lines in Kepler. Some of the Kepler Tesla/Quadro cards have GPUs (GK110 being one such example) that are made purely out of Kepler FP-64 cores that can run dual-precision math in a 1:1 performance ratio to what they can run single-precision.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]hegelund[/nom]is the radeon 7970 newer than the nvidia gtx 690 ?? sry for off-topic maybe[/citation]

The 7970 is a few months older. However, they are not really in the same budget. The 690 is a dual-GPU card that goes for upwards of $1K and the 7970 is a single-GPU card that goes for generally under $500. The 7970 can be said to compete with the GTX 670 rather than the GTX 690.

 

[eddieroolz]

This is certainly an interesting cooling concept by Gigabyte but I'm afraid that it's been a mixed bag. While it demonstrates that it can cool just as well as having radial fans, there's a high pitch metallic whine as Igor notes. There's also the issue of side ventilation, which not all cases have.

But, given that Gigabyte properly implements a heatsink that's designed for the board, and applies better TIM, then perhaps this type of cooling can find a niche.

 

[captaincharisma]

[citation][nom]hellfire24[/nom]gigabyte gtx 7970 *house brick* edition.lol[/citation]

that card will just physically kill any computer