VTX3D's HD 7970 X-Edition uses the proven AMD reference design PCB with a custom dual fan cooler and massively increased clock speeds out of the box. While the AMD reference design runs at clocks of 925 MHz core and 1375 MHz memory, VTX3D has bumped that to 1050 MHz / 1425 MHz. This increase helps the card gain some lost ground to GTX 680. Averaged over our benchmarks it is just 1% slower, the improvement over the HD 7970 is 7%.
The new dual fan cooler works flawlessly. It provides extremely low noise levels in idle and a decent improvement over the HD 7970 reference design under load. Temperatures are fine as well, ending up a bit lower than the AMD HD 7970. Additional manual overclocking potential was slim, because the overclock out of the box exploited the headroom already. In absolute numbers the maximum clock speeds are slightly higher than the AMD reference design, but generally in the same region, which is not surprising given the design similarities.
VTX3D was kind enough to include three different adapters in their box, which is great, because it will allow you to run pretty much any combination of monitors on the card, without having to buy any additional adapters. The included active mini-DP to DP adapter alone is worth $30. If you plan on running a 3x 1080p setup using DVI monitors then you won't have to buy such an adapter which effectively reduces the price of the X-Edition by 30 bucks. With a price of $480, the card offers slightly better price/performance compared to the AMD reference design, but will be a tough sell when compared to NVIDIA's latest GTX 670.