SAPPHIRE 11197-06-40G Radeon HD 7970 3GB 384-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card

Pros: Very Quiet
DisplayPort
Graphic processing
Frame Rate
Cooling design

Cons: HDMI port/circuitry (maybe)
Price

Other Thoughts: Sapphire has a very nice product here. The DisplayPort works great! Wish I had more time in the day to troubleshoot the HDMI port/circuitry. When I connect to my LCD via HDMI, a lightning bolt appears sporadically across the screen. Could be the HDMI port/circuitry on my monitor or signal processing somewhere else. In any case, I am glad that I encountered this issue because I learned that I like DisplayPort better than HDMI, at least for my PC monitor setup. Thank you Apple for DisplayPort! Newegg did an excellent job of packaging and delivering this product. Thank you Sapphire, AMD, and Newegg!

Pros: FAST - this reference based card will destroy today's and tomorrow's games.

Price - compared to the other 7970 reference cards this card is dollar per clock the best deal.

Weight - yeah, believe it or not it's the second lightest card in the reference line and at the same time is one of the largest (the largest?) 7970's extending a little over 2 PCI slots. Expect a crossfire to be an ungodly tight fit.

Cooling - this is what makes Sapphire part of the "name brand" group. The custom cooling on this reference design is better than any stock reference cooling by several degrees every time. Current overclock is 1125/1575 (stock voltage) with my current temperatures at 29 Celsius. I can play TERA Online and Deus Ex at max settings keeping 60 Celcius (2 hour gaming session for test).

Fits perfect in the ARCTIC COOLING ACCEL-X-7970 (custom cooling fan) in case you want quieter cooling and a couple extra degrees lower temp.

It's a X970 card: see other thoughts

Cons: BIG - this card will need room. I'm using a Rosewill BLACKHAWK-ULTRA Gaming Super Tower so room wasn't an issue for me. I also tested the fit inside a APEVIA X-TROOPER Series X mid tower and it still fit just fine with at least a half inch before hitting drive bay.

Price: 7970's are expensive and to be honest if you have a 5850/5870/5970/6950/6970 (hard to believe that 5000 series was clocked higher than 6000 series, but the 6000's were much more stable) I wouldn't upgrade unless you HAVE TO HAVE the highest FPS on [insert gaming obsession here]. The performance difference is absolutely not worth the current cost.

It's a X970 card: see other thoughts

Other Thoughts: When you buy anything with "970" after that first digit understand that you are buying a cutting edge that is so sharp you may very well cut yourself. Games will sometimes have weird glitches and videos can have artifacts. Drivers fix these kind of issues, but you have to wait for them. (As of this posting the 12.7 Beta catalyst has corrected all my issues with games.)

970 also means luck of the draw overclocking. I mean it is a coin toss whether your overclock will match that of Johnny overclocker or not because it LITERALLY comes down to the small differences in material quality between each card.

With that said, if you are in a case where you understand how the air moves (and that heat rises - the number of bottom exhausts I've seen good lawd) you will be able to safely overclock to 1125/1575 on stock. After that do what you will, and do it SLOWLY.

This is the second time I've felt compelled enough to write a review for a product. Bravo Sapphire for keeping to quality.