Introduction

GIGABYTE'S HD 7970 Super Overclock or "SOC" is the company's flagship HD 7970 geared towards overclockers and enthusiasts. It comes with a new cooling design which uses many small fans on the side of the heatsink, instead of a large centered fan. Clock speeds have been increased significantly compared to the HD 7970; GPU clock is now 1080 MHz and memory is clocked at 1375 MHz.

While an exact pricing is not known yet, GIGABYTE suggests the card will retail around the $500 mark.

Packaging & Contents

We received a card without retail packaging or accessories from GIGABYTE. Rest assured, the card will come with the usual goodies in the package, like power cables and adapters.

The Card

Gigabyte's card is fully covered by the huge heatsink which also extends a bit beyond the top edge of the card.


The card requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include one DVI port, one full size HDMI port and two mini-DisplayPorts. You may use all the outputs at the same time.

An HDMI sound device is included in the GPU, too. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes HD audio and support for Blu-ray 3D movies. The DisplayPort outputs are version 1.2 which enables the use of hubs and Multi-Stream Transport.


You may combine up to four HD 7970 cards from any vendor in a multi-GPU CrossFire configuration for higher framerates or better image quality settings.


Pictured above are the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods, etc., please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.

A Closer Look

Gigabyte has chosen a unique cooling approach on their card. Five small fans sit one the side of the cooler, which promises better cooling performance and improved airflow in a multi-GPU CrossFire configuration.


The heatsink uses a large copper vapor-chamber base to soak up heat from the GPU, the memory chips and the voltage regulation circuitry. Heat is then transferred to the large fin array using four heatpipes, which are doubled up - they exit to the left and the right of the cooler's base.


On the back of the card Gigabyte has installed a metal backplate which doesn't have much impact on cooling, but will help protect the card against damage during handling.


The card requires two 8-pin PCI-Express power cables for operation. This power configuration is good for up to 375 W of power draw.


The HD 7970 comes with AMD's dual BIOS feature that was introduced with the HD 6900 Series. It provides a safety net in case a BIOS flash goes wrong; simply switch to the second BIOS and flash back to the original BIOS. Unlike the reference design which has this switch at the top edge, Gigabyte has chosen to put it in the middle of the card, under the cooler. The second BIOS is a BIOS optimized for liquid nitrogen hardcore overclocking, but it will also work as safe backup BIOS in case the main BIOS gets corrupted.


For voltage control the card uses a CHiL CHL8228 and a CHiL 8225. We have seen both chips on recent high-end graphics cards designs. They both offer software voltage control and extensive monitoring features.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix, and carry the model number H5GQ2H24MF-R0C. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


AMD's Tahiti graphics processor introduced the GCN shader architecture, it is also the first GPU to be produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC. The transistor count is 4.31 billion.