Saturday, December 31st 2011
Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 Custom-Design Graphics Card Pictured
Here is the first picture of a non-reference design Radeon HD 7970 graphics card. Made by Gigabyte, the GV-R797OC-3GD is a factory-overclocked graphics card, which makes use of a custom Ultra Durable VGA+ PCB by the company, and a custom-design triple-fan WindForce cooler. Its Ultra Durable VGA+ PCB makes use of 2 oz copper layer for better electrical stability and heat distribution, ferrite-core chokes, low RDS (on) MOSFETs, hand-picked high-performance GDDR5 memory chips, etc.
The cooler makes use of a combination of heatsinks and aluminum fin arrays to which heat from the GPU, memory, and VRM is fed by copper heat-pipes, and ventilated by three fans. Gigabyte also has a reference-design graphics card, which uses a reference-design cooling assembly, and most likely also a reference design PCB, except that it's colored red. It's not likely that red color PCB will be standard among AIB-branded retail cards, because the HIS and MSI cards pictured by OCUK recently, were found to have black-colored ones. There's no word of the pricing or clock speeds.
Source:
HardwareLuxx.de
The cooler makes use of a combination of heatsinks and aluminum fin arrays to which heat from the GPU, memory, and VRM is fed by copper heat-pipes, and ventilated by three fans. Gigabyte also has a reference-design graphics card, which uses a reference-design cooling assembly, and most likely also a reference design PCB, except that it's colored red. It's not likely that red color PCB will be standard among AIB-branded retail cards, because the HIS and MSI cards pictured by OCUK recently, were found to have black-colored ones. There's no word of the pricing or clock speeds.
17 Comments on Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 Custom-Design Graphics Card Pictured
This i will never understand...
Edit: Red pcb is one thing, but blue?? seriously, they never learn...
Must agree I'd rather have a card without a ugly sticker, but it comes down to quality/price when I buy things I cant really see.
This might be the brand I'll buy.
I have had a palit 7600gt with red pcb and it was so hot!
Also have a palit 9500gt red pcb ^_^
I like hoe GB is actually offering a color other than blue for their GPus. Nice.
The blue PCB one is not a stock 7970 its is an OC version, so it will cost more.
Dunno where the cards are made though...
Before I knew about reference card being cheaper rather than better, I went out and bought a non-reference card.
I didn't know the reasons why it was cheaper and from my untrained point of view it seemed like a great deal as it was a shorter PCB and had what appeared to be superior cooling (Zalman VF830).
Well.
It didn't have superior cooling as the fan was locked at 80%, only cooling down the card to 71degC and the chokes were making an awful whine.
Went through three of them.
The last one I accidentally dropped and ended up getting an HD4850 instead.
Also in quite a few cases the non-reference coolers have no VRAM and/or VRM cooling.