SAPPHIRE 21197-00-40G Radeon HD 7970 3GB 384-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card

Pros: Great Video card. Was a big upgrade for me. I was using a 9600.

Cons: My video card is running at 80-85 C when I'm playing WoW and going into a dungeon. The fan on the until won't go past 50 percent... which seems odd. I have a massive cooler master tower case. I have the 212 fan for the CPU and a fan until for the Dominator 2666 Ram. I have the Maximus V mother board.

With all the fans I have going in the case, I'm having a hard time seeing why the video card is getting up to 85 C!

I just ordered the ARCTIC COOLING ACCEL-X-7970 Fluid Dynamic Accelero Xtreme 7970 VGA Cooler for AMD Radeon.

I hope that helps!

Other Thoughts: Great card but it runs very very hot.

Pros: Runs just about anything I throw at it at full settings. I love this card and will be purchasing another as crossfire.

Cons: None thus far

Pros: works, fairly quiet under 50%, stock cooling might be good enough if the paste is changed and coolers applied

Cons: Quandry: noisy cooler at gaming settings or
add a ARTIC 7970 cooler, Item#: N82E16835186064 , (CHEAPEST HERE AT the egg} for quiet and cool, but cpu fan jumps a little since hot air is dumped inside the case. banish the hot blast with a fan, duh, or mount the 7970 on the bottom x16 pcie bracket. It will be isolated on the bottom x16 motherboard rung and room for a small housefan.

Other Thoughts: needes an after market cooler 7970, Item#: N82E16835186064 , for some or headphones and stock. Use a very coolest case. All this advice will send your warranty far away, I think. Neweg shipped fast and undamaged.

Pros: This card is beastly! I upgraded from a gigabyte 6850-oc when I upgraded my monitor from a 18" to a 23.6" and this card as run everything that I have thrown at it!

Cons: It is a bit loud for my liking however I got this card for the reference pcb not for the cooler.

Pros: Fast. Everything just looks nicer. No lag in games. Nba2k12, Crysys 2, Witcher 2, Farcry 2, Skyrim, Fallout 3 , Fallout New Vegas, Diablo 3, Guildwars 2, Shogun 2, MW#, Darksiders 2, Mass Effect 3, dirt 3, SC2. All set to max or near max. Some games are constantly over 120 fps at 1920x1080. Haven't tried BF3 or Metro yet. Great multi-tasker, 3GB ram is good if you want 3 screens and don't want 2 video cards. Upgraded from a 240GT !

Cons: I constantly find myself in the DVD/BR isle at BB or WM lol. Just so i can game on one screen, watch Bluerays/DVD's on another, surf on a 3rd.

The card whines on some games, whether it is stressed or not, Headphones fix that. Only on a few instances or games though. At max fan speed it is loud! Louder than a compressor. About as loud as a v8 at 10,000 rpms. But you expect that with reference design.

55°C at Idle with 20% fan speed. I can't hear the fan over my H100 push pull fans. In fact its kind of too quiet.

Other Thoughts: Unigine Heaven DX11 3.0
57.4 FPS
1446 score
12.3 min FPS
121.3 max FPS
Tesselation Normal
Shaders High
Anisotropy 4x
Stereo 3D Disabled
Anti-aliasing 8x
Full screen
1920x1080

I ran it on one monitor with another monitor on at 1280 x 1080. Not sure how much that matters. With aa off this thing is constant 100 fps +.
Stock speeds and fans.

Haf 932 Advanced Case with side panels off.
Gigabyte z77 PCI Express 3.0
i-7 3770k at 3.9ghz
H100 with push pull
Corsair 16GB ram
WD Caviar Black 1TB HD
HAF 1000 PSU

Pros: My friend constantly complained about this card, its drivers ect, and would recieve bad framerates on low intensity games. Out of anger he gives it to me to put in my system. I was pleasantly surprised to see it running BF3 on Ultra at 55-60 fps. As it turns out he had faulty RAM, and a faulty motherboard. This card is outstanding, too many people blame the card for problems when it could be something else. Plus this card is CHEAP for what you recieve.

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: Although it runs hot 70C-80C under load, its a good temp range considering the power this thing pulls in. Also, as a rival to the GTX580 this thing scores higher on all benchmarks, and its nearly $200 cheaper too.

Pros: I was running this card using a Sunbeam 680 Watt power supply for almost a year. Just yesterday my PSU blew, along with blue fire and smoke... Discovered that this card needs 700+ Watt PSU due to all the power it needs when at full load. That being said, overall I love this card and it runs quiet and cool. I'm getting an average of double the frame rates that I did with my Radeon 6870.

Cons: Other than the generous power requirements that this card needs (700+ watts), I really have nothing bad to say about it. The drivers work great, and I'm not at all disappointed from leaving NVidia. I think the quality of Radeon for video playback is much better than NVidia's. It is a big and long card, so be prepared to have room in your box for it!

Pros: Cannot think of any

Cons: Multi-monitor plagued with problems
Constant screen noise and artifacts on 2 of 3 LCD panels
Screens just go black randomly for no reason
Have to reboot several times to get them all to work
Cannot put monitors to sleep or turn them off as not all of them will wake up. Trying a new case, power supply and a clean install in a week so see if this helps. I will likely replace this card soon.

Other Thoughts: After spending $600 on this card the week it came out, I regret it. I was not aware I had to spend another $100+ to purchase an accell graphics active mini-display port adapter. Ticked off

I have had many ATI cards. Most recently a 4870x2, 5870 and now 7970. After 6months with this garbage card I am ordering a 4gb 680GTX.

Pros: Runs pretty cool.

Cons: I'm not sure if I have a faulty card or not....with max graphics running WoW i get about 30-70 fps on average with about 50% activity. GW2 i get about 25-40 fps on average with 35-50% card activity. Average of 47 fps on the Heaven benchmark 100% activity. D3 200-300 fps 100% activity. LoL average of 170 fps. I do not understand why my framerate is so low on some games with low card activity and other games the card does it's job...I'm calling Sapphire today to see if I have a faulty card, drivers, etc.

Other Thoughts: I don't think my pc is bottlenecking the card at all. Here are my stats & settlings...
-AMD quad core 3.2ghz
-8gb ram
-1080p 25" monitor & 15" LCD
-ALL DRIVERS are up to date (even re-installed all drivers from websites)
-All Catalyst control options are turned off. (Use application settings) is turned on.

Basicall it does not matter if I'm manually controlling the AMD catalyst control settings or not my fps does not change. Nothing changes after I uninstall/reinstall drivers, disable 2nd monitor, fullscreen and/or window mode, etc. So why does my card run only 1 game and benchmark good. but doesnt run others good? 7970 is supposed to run GW2 the best.....apparently my 7970 & 680 friends have 30-100+ fps higher than me on all these games... So before I give this card bad reviews I'm calling to see if I've done everything possible on my end.

Pros: Excellent drivers, blows through any game that I throw at it with a steady 60-190 fps depending on the game engine. Starcraft I easily hit 120 fps with all settings to high. I run it with 8 Gigs of DDR 1666, Hex Core Phenom II 3.7Ghz, 680 Watt Enermax Power Supply.

Cons: None, I have had this card for 6 months now no problems at all.

Other Thoughts: Love Sapphire, I've been a big fan of them ever since I purchased off brands and noticed my whites were yellows and the colors were dreary. Thought it was my monitor but it was the graphics card. Sapphire has always delivered consistent quality.