Introduction

Normally when we get a video card like the Sapphire HD 7970 GHz Edition TOXIC 6GB we'd just go down the path of overclocking it instead of looking at its default clock speeds. Because of the massive out of the box clock speeds it offered combined with the fact that it was our first 6GB card, we really wanted to test it as is to see just what kind of performance this card offered us over other ones including a pre-overclocked GTX 680.

GHz Edition HD 7970s, though, are coming through quite slowly both to us and the retail market. Because of that we're not too sure when the next one will come and we're not sure if it will carry not only 6GB of GDDR5, but a cooler as strong as the one we've got here on the TOXIC version from Sapphire.

Because of that we figured we'd see how overclocking goes on this GHz Edition retail video card. With such a strong cooler and the added memory, we wanted to find out what the retail version of the new GHz Edition card is capable of when we put it to the test.

As always we'd normally check out the package and then move onto the card itself. Because we've already done a review on the Sapphire HD 7970 GHz Edition TOXIC 6GB, though, we don't need to cover that stuff again. Instead we're going to get into the test system setup and look at the cards that will be in our graphs today. Along with that, though, we'll also covering the overclocking side of things which is the main thing we want to highlight as we find out just what this new model is capable of.

Once we find out what kind of overclock we're able to achieve we want to see how it compares to two other cards we've looked at. The first is the reference HD 7970 GHz Edition and the other is the MSI HD 7970 Lightning based on the original core. The Lightning series is best known for its overclocking capabilities and was our best HD 7970 when it came to overclocking. We're wondering if the new GHz Edition model is capable of even more when a company like Sapphire gets a hold of it, so let's find out.