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When it comes to parting with your money on a piece of computer hardware you know damn well it better meet your needs or more to make it worth your while. With that said why is the Sapphire Dual-X Version of the HD 7970 worth your time? Well for starters let talk about something not in the review, warranty, support and RMA availability as these things usually get washed over, but are very important aspects of a purchase. Sapphire covers all those areas very well and has an office in southern California that handles RMA and exchange and their web presence is also very easy to use. Registering your card gives you the full warranty and protection, but the card has a 1-year warranty regardless.
Now as far as the cards performance and overall appeal lets talk about the cooling first, at full load, which is really all that matters the card ran at 68 Celsius and drew about 490W of power. The reference card ran at 74C so it is much cooler than a stock cooled card. Having the ability to simply click a switch to get instant overclocking is something that for those who do not know a lot about overclocking can still overclock without having to risk making any changes in the TRIXX software GUI.
Superior cooling and instant overclocking make the Sapphire Dual-X HD 7970 a step above the usual reference based cards and having the protection of its dual BIOS makes it very overclocker friendly a show in for an Editor’s Choice Award. Sapphire did a good job here with enough features to satisfy, but not so much as to confuse them a fine balance indeed. At the end of the day if you are thinking about jumping onto a new AMD 7 series card and want more than just vanilla as your flavor, take a look right here at the Sapphire Dual-X HD 7970, it’s something a bit different than your standard fare. Thanks for taking the time to read this review, Peace!
