Lately it has seemed that Sapphire has been cranking out the custom cards left and right to satisfy the needs of those who want something that is a bit better than the reference design in terms of cooling and reliability. As AMD's largest partner, Sapphire has the ability to deliver more than than just a reference solution with a sticker on it. In the Vapor-X line we have looked at the Vapor-X HD 7950, Vapor-X HD 7970 3GB and Toxic Edition HD 7970. After looking at what Sapphire brought to the table with the Toxic Edition HD 7970 6GB card, Sapphire reached a new pinnacle with its custom 12 layer PCB, voltage check points load monitoring LEDs, Black Diamond Chokes a massive Vapor-X cooling solution, 6GB of GDDR5 memory, highly binned silicon and the list goes on.

Surprisingly Sapphire went back to the well with this version of the Vapor-X-equipped HD 7970 GHz Edition 6GB card by incorporating just about all of the feature set of the Toxic Edition with a core that does not go through all of the time consuming binning process. Even without the top end binning on the GPU core, the GHz Edition base line feature set is enough to satisfy the needs of a great many with a "Boost" clock of 1100MHz at the touch of the EZ OC button. Sapphire's Vapor-X HD 7970 GHz Edition 6GB card is equipped with Sapphire's own "Dynamic Power suite" that includes a ten phase power design, double sided Black Diamond Chokes, and DirectFET technology mounted on a 12 layer PCB all topped off with a Vapor-X cooler capable of dissipating any thermal load the card can throw at it and keep the Tahiti XT core alive and cool to fight another day.

The 6GB frame buffer is going to up the price point to around $599 or about a $130 premium over the 3GB frame buffer version and $80 less than the limited "Toxic " Edition. Targeted at the multi screen gamer, the Vapor-X HD 7970 6GB card should offer up an increase in performance when the texture count starts to soar. Let's see where this Vapor-X rendition falls in terms of performance especially since we know the cooling is in good hands.