I've decided to ditch my Trifire setup and Crossfire altogether, I've grown pretty tired of it. One nicely overclocked 7970 seems to be very nearly as good as my setup anyway so I can't justify not making the switch. I want one very strong card so I'm looking at one of the Vapor-X cards and even the Lightning BE. Is there any reason to pick one over the other? Is one known to overclock better than the other? My aim is 1200MHz, I think at that point I'm not really losing all that much performance. I don't care much about fan noise. After owning a 6990 I am immune to such things
The VaporX isn't really worth the premium, the extra 3GB of RAM does basically nothing. Just look at the regular Toxic edition of the 7970, you should be able to hit 1200 with one.
Both my Lightnings run 1200 mhz at stock Ghz edition voltage, will run 1800 mhz v ram and run cool, very happy
The Vapor-X and Toxic are 2 completely unrelated cards. There is only 1 Toxic, it's a 7970 w/ 6GB vram and comes factory overclocked @1200/1600mhz. Vapor-X has 3GB vram, comes in both 7950/70 flavours and standard clock speeds but uses Vapor Chamber cooling, hence the name Vapor-X....
I would be cautious about the added power consumption of the Lightning, and the locked voltage of the Vapor-X (hardware or BIOS-based? 7950 Vapor X is BIOS locked).
I have two of the 3gb vapor x ghz edition cards man and maybe i was unlucky but i cant hit 1200mhz on either of them and be completely stable. 1150mhz is ok though. Im still very happy with them but in my experience with these cards, in terms of overclocking potential, not so great. I havent tried any bios flashes or anything yet so maybe there is still some hope for 1200mhz
See I noticed the extra power consumption of the Lightning in some reviews. Why is this exactly? It isn't a trivial amount of power either. I have read about the Sapp 7950s being locked but have not heard anything about the 7970s having this issue. In either case I think all GHz edition ASICs come at 1.256v by default (or so I've read) which is probably not much lower than my personal limit. I can't see myself pushing 1.3v+ through whatever card I end up buying
Well it turns out disty's in my country aren't supplying the 3GB Vapor-X 7970 anymore so I pulled the trigger on the Lightning as my only other option was the 6GB Vapor-X which is actually $80 more expensive. Sold my 6990 and 6970 so the Lightning is only costing me $100. I'll post oc results after I've had a while to play around with it.