Gigabyte's HD 7970 Super OC comes with a new approach to cooling. Instead of placing the fan(s) on the large surface of the heatsink like on all recent graphics cards, the company chose to position five small fans along the top edge of the card. This results in a more uniform airflow across all components, but could also result in more fan noise. The card does definitely look menacing with its triple slot design and the small fans, which might scare some potential buyers away. In our review we see reasonable noise levels under load that are actually slightly quieter than the AMD reference HD 7970 and GHz Edition. In idle the card is too noisy though, which seems to be caused by fan settings in the BIOS instead of the cooler design. Temperatures are decent but I fail to see big improvements which would warrant the new approach to cooling. Having the fans on the side does provide a clear benefit to CrossFire configurations though. In such a scenario the inlet of a typical fan would be blocked by an adjacent graphics card. Small fast-running fans usually have a shorter lifetime than larger fans, which might become a problem for the HD 7970 SOC further down the road, but we have no data on that.
Thanks to a large overclock out of the box the HD 7970 SOC is one of the fastest HD 7970 cards you can buy at the moment, 9% faster than the HD 7970 and even 1% faster than AMD's HD 7970 GHz Edition. Compared to NVIDIA's GTX 680, the SOC has a clear advantage at high resolutions of 2560x1600 and beyond. At lower resolution both cards are roughly equal.
Gigabyte's card is designed for overclockers, which is apparent in the powerful VRM design, using two voltage controllers with software voltage control. Our manual overclocking tests show good overclocking potential, especially memory OC delivers outstanding results. Even higher clocks are possible with increased voltage, but I expected a bit more from the triple slot cooler. Once you crank up the voltage the little fans will spin very fast, very noisy. I've seen over 8000 RPM!
Many hardcore overclockers use GPU-Z's ASIC Quality reading feature to quickly screen cards for overclocking potential. While traditional overclockers using air cooling typically look for high ASIC quality values, the LN2 crowd searches for low values. On the HD 7970 SOC GPU-Z reported a very low ASIC quality reading of 55.2%, which suggests that Gigabyte is screening GPUs using that method, too. Just to clarify, low ASIC Quality does not mean that the GPU will break soon or is prone to damage, it just reflects the GPU's leakage current, which is an indicator of overclocking potential, heat output and required voltage.
Gigabyte was unable to provide final pricing for their HD 7970 Super OC yet, but we expect it to retail around the $500 mark. At that price, which is the same as the HD 7970 GHz Edition, the card would certainly be competitive. If you have three slots in your system I'd definitely recommend the HD 7970 Super OC over the AMD HD 7970 GHz Edition as it provides the same performance at the same price, but does better in terms of power, noise and heat.