Sapphire’s Vapor-X HD 7970 6 GB Monster

We already know that AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 is a very capable GPU and that it currently holds the world record for single-GPU video cards in FutureMark’s 3D Mark 11 Extreme score and Performance score, as we documented here and here.

The thing is that Nvidia’s Kepler is quite a lot more efficient than AMD’s Tahiti architecture and, despite it having 19% less transistors and a 33% narrower memory BUS, it is able to overtake AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 reference edition. On the other hand, it is well known that AMD’s first generation of GCN GPU is quite able to handle overclocking and has achieved very high frequencies. It’s no wonder that Tahiti is the “overclocker’s best friend,” but even AIB partners have released a heap of pre-overclocked Radeon HD 7970 video cards. Sapphire probably has the most impressive version of AMD’s Radeon HD 7970, as its frequencies surpass even the AMD Radeon 7970 GHz Edition we reported about here.

Sapphire’s Vapor-X reportedly comes with double the amount of reference memory, and that is a huge 6 GB of GDDR5. Being a factory overclocked design, the card comes with default frequencies of 1100 MHz for the GPU and 1500 MHz for the memory. That’s 6000 MHz effective memory frequency. Normally, the card stays clocked at 1000 MHz for the GPU and 1450 MHz for the memory, but when a special overclocking switch is pressed, the GPU frequency will be upped automatically at 1100 MHz and the memory will run at 1500 MHz.

In 2D or standby mode, the frequencies will be reduced to 300/150MHz and the core voltage will be 0.875V, while the fan speed will stay at 1150RPM generating almost no noise. We have no word on the pricing, but we expect this to be worth around $500.

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