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When we firstly wrote about AMD’s referent card Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, our only remark was that it gives out too much noise with the manufacturers fan. It was just a question of time when their partners are going to put on the market their own models that don’t follow the referent design.

As expected, Sapphire was the first to come out, putting on the market their version of Vapor-X. Except for the most impressive “vapor-chamber” cooler, that the company has implemented on any card so far, this Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition uses a fully redesigned PCB, in accordance to the referent card. We cannot say if the redesigned printed circuit board is better, but we can notice that it lacks the buzzing sound of the coils when it is working at full thrust, which is a characteristic at the expensive GPU’s.

Besides that, the coolant system is phenomenal, so you won’t hear even the slightest noise, even after a long gaming session.  At all times the temperatures won’t pass the limit of 60 degrees, which is a phenomenal data, when we take into consideration that this GPU works at 1 GHz and has 4.3 billion transistors.  Don’t forget that under that cooler you can find 3 GB of GDDR5 memory that is working at 6 GHz. Even though this memory doesn’t heat up that much, it still gives out certain heat, so we can praise Sapphire once again for the excellent design.

The rest of the specs are almost the same as the referent model.  The working speed is at the referent 1GHz, even though it spends most of the time in Turbo mode that gives it 50MHz more.  The board has 4 connectors and on the other side two power connectors.  With the change of the PCB they changed the ports so we have 2xDVI ports, 1xHDMI and 1xDisplay Port.

This model has no better performances than the referent card, but its improved manufacturing process and the noiseless work make it a great catch.