When AMD releases some new graphic cards, it send some of the samples to its manufacturing partners. Asus, Gigabyte, HIS and MSI are some of the partners of AMD. These partners then tune the graphic cards and try to make it better than the reference one. These partners use their custom coolers, custom tweaks to make it even more better. Sometimes their tweaks work flawlessly and these partners release the graphic card with a different title like Lightning Edition, Super OC Edition, Black Edition and many more. These cards are really much better performers, than the reference one.
Below are some of the top special edition graphic cards from AMD graphic card partners:
Asus is a Taiwanese multinational computer hardware and electronics company headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan. Its products include motherboards, desktops, laptops, monitors, tablet PCs, servers, video cards and mobile phones. Asus have always been the leader of special edition graphic cards, and Asus Radeon HD 7970 DirectCU II Top is simply amazing. It features a triple slot cooler with Dual fans. The card also features 4 display port, and two standard DVI ports. The ASUS Radeon HD 7970 DirectCU II already comes factory overclocked at a good 1000 MHz, that will instantly bring you extra performance right out of the box. But there is room left, if you manually overclock without voltage tweaking 1100 MHz is viable. With voltage tweaking 1200~1250 MHz can be achieved quite well.
Sapphire Technology is a Hong Kong-based technology company, which produces graphics cards for personal computers and workstations, motherboards, TV tuner cards, digital audio players and LCD TVs. Sapphire’s products are based on AMD graphics processing units, and both AMD and Intel motherboard chipset technology. The company is the largest supplier of AMD-based video cards in the world. Sapphire was the first company to release a video card with a high definition multimedia interface (HDMI) connector.Sapphire was the first company to release a video card having clock speed of 1000 MHz (1 GHz) with the release of the Sapphire Atomic Edition HD 4890.
No doubt, Sapphire is one of the best AMD graphic card partner and Sapphire HD 7970 is really impressive. This card is made especially for overclocking. It ships with a dual-BIOS system, one with a GPU core clock of 950MHz and memory clock of 1,425MHz for regular use, and a second with GPU core clock of 1,000MHz and memory clock of 1,450MHz for overclocking use. Equipped with dual coolers, and heat pipes to keep the card cooler, and perform efficiently. The 7970 OC graphics card features a Dual link DVI connector, an HDMI port and two mini display ports for a range of screen options.
Micro-Star International Co., Ltd (MSI) is a electronics company based in New Taipei City, Taiwan. It is one of the world’s largest motherboard and video card manufacturers.
MSI is one of my favorite, because of good build quality and over clocking capabilities. Design of MSI graphic cards are much better than all others. That’s not all, great build quality, beautiful design and awesome over clocking capabilities MSI is really one of the best. The lightning series of MSI is famous for its high core speed under liquid nitrogen cooling. The card features a fully unlocked BIOS with no over-voltage protection, allowing overclockers to push extreme voltages.
XFX originally only produced nVidia graphic cards, however during the beginning of 2009, XFX decided it would exclusively manufacture AMD based graphics cards, and would no longer use nVidia chips. XFX also produces non-reference design graphic cards, and is well known for their double lifetime, modder-friendly warranty. XFX 7970 Black Edition also provides great over clocking capabilities, and better performance. Two Mini DisplayPorts, and HDMI port and a DVI port make sure nearly any monitor can plug right into the card.
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