The Radeon HD 7970 is AMD's flagship desktop graphics card and has been around since December 2011. When the card was originally released it the reference design had an MSRP of $549.99. You can now find a third party Radeon HD 7970 3GB video card for $379.99 shipped after rebate! Prices have certainly dropped over the past year and you can get a top of the line Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 Vapor-X graphics card for $449.99 shipped after rebate. We just happen to have the Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 Vapor-X 3GB GDDR5 video card to review today!

The AMD Radeon HD 7970 (Tahiti XT) reference card features a core clock speed of 925MHz with 2048 stream processors and 128 texture units. The reference card has 3GB of GDDR5 memory on a 384-bit bus that runs at 1325MHz (5300 MHZ effective). The Sapphire HD 7970 Vapor-X video card is factory overclocked up to 1050MHz on the core and 1500MHz (6000MHz effective on the memory) and features a custom PCB and GPU cooler! For gamers that want a DirectX 11 graphics card with cutting edge 28nm GPU built using the new Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture this is as good as it gets for AMD.