Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 SOC

Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 SOC Review

Celebrating Tahiti's "half birthday" last month, AMD relaunched its Radeon HD 7970 with a factory-overclocked "GHz Edition" offering that increased the reference design's core clock speed from 925MHz to 1GHz with the intention of claiming the company now offered the world's fastest GPU. Unfortunately, the festivities were short-lived for several reasons. Not only was it already possible to buy an HD 7970 running at those speeds and beyond, but AMD wasn't truly able to nab the performance crown back from Nvidia as the HD 7970 GHz Edition and the GTX 680 are about equal. Additionally, it was hard to get excited about such a marginal performance bump when it's associated with a $50 price hike. To date, there are no official HD 7970 GHz Edition cards available and in hindsight, AMD could have collaborated with a board partner to deliver something more impressive. On the bright side, Gigabyte has taken matters into its own hands with the new HD 7970 SOC (Super OverClock) card, which seems to be far more interesting than AMD's solution.