In one way, the Sapphire HD 7970 OC Edition wins this competition because of the simple fact that you can actually buy it.  However, we are also interested in the performance difference as you can occasionally find a GTX 680 for sale, so we need to know how the overclocked HD7970 performs.  Sapphire has placed two separate overclocked BIOSes on this card, one with a 950MHz core and 1425MHz memory as well as a more aggressively set one with a cores of 1000MHz and 1450MHz on the memory.  As it turned out [H]ard|OCP was never able to get the more aggressive BIOS to work, on the other hand when they manually overclocked it they hit 1150MHz core and 1860MHz for the memory at which speeds the card triumphed over the GTX 680 in every test.  Sapphire’s card is ~$75 more than a GTX680 but remember, you can actually buy one.

"The Sapphire HD 7970 OC Edition video card has arrived and brings promise of low temperatures with Sapphires Dual-X Cooling System. It also features a Dual BIOS with both a passive and more aggressive profile. Will Sapphires highest end HD 7970 be able to keep up and compete with NVIDIA’s flagship GeForce GTX 680?"

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