7950 for GF, any particular brands to avoid?

[SickBeast]

Hey I'm coming back to remove my recommendation of Gigabyte. They voltage lock most of their cards now and it's at the hardware level so a BIOS flash won't fix it. If you don't overclock then it's fine but I don't know why you would leave 20%+ performance on the table. I'm really irritated because I just bought a Gigabyte 7970 and I'm going to see if their tech support can do anything for me. It's really shady how they did it. The revision 1.0 PCB supported overvolting and those are the cards that all the reviewers got, then they just locked everything down at the hardware level with revision 2.0, leaving any serious overclocker screwed. I don't even know if what they did is legal. It's certainly not ethical.

I will only be buying MSI graphics cards from now on, and perhaps even motherboards. The disrespect that so many of these companies show toward the enthusiast community is appalling.

 

[Essence_of_War]

That's sort of annoying. Thanks for the heads-up!

 

[Nec_V20]

I typically go with names like Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI, but I'm avoiding Asus for everything from now on due to their extremely crappy and adversarial warranty system.

I pretty much had a "draw circle, bang head" experience with ASUS when my motherboard (three days old) running off a Corsair AX850 PSU turned into a rock.

The point at which I said, "F**k it" and got a Gigabyte X58A-UD3R was when I read that the person writing to me from ASUS recommended a, and I quote, "BIOS upgradation" as a fix. What the hell is an "upgradation"?

I have steered clear of ASUS since then.

 

[chubbyfatazn]

Not really understanding the hate for Sapphire here. Their warranty may not be the best among others, but they do make a solid product.

I've got this Sapphire 7950 and it's been awesome. Idles at 36C in my case, and the fan is as quiet as I could expect it to be. It gets a bit noisy when it's running at higher speeds, but what GPU fan doesn't? It's certainly better than the blower coolers I've had.

I've never had a GPU fail on me. I was afraid of my Powercolor 6950 going belly up and me not getting any support, but I got it for $170 when they were still $230+ and I can't complain about it at all. I'd still be using it as a primary card if I didn't move to a 25x14 monitor.

 

[Nec_V20]

Not really understanding the hate for Sapphire here. Their warranty may not be the best among others, but they do make a solid product.

I've got this Sapphire 7950 and it's been awesome. Idles at 36C in my case, and the fan is as quiet as I could expect it to be. It gets a bit noisy when it's running at higher speeds, but what GPU fan doesn't? It's certainly better than the blower coolers I've had.

I've never had a GPU fail on me. I was afraid of my Powercolor 6950 going belly up and me not getting any support, but I got it for $170 when they were still $230+ and I can't complain about it at all. I'd still be using it as a primary card if I didn't move to a 25x14 monitor.

Before I parted with the money I took a good few weeks to look around and find out about what was going in the way of graphic cards and looking at not only reviews but what was being said about the cards in various forums.

Many reviews in either videos or on sites are just done by shills, but one can still learn a lot by what they DON'T say.

To cut a very long story short I finally decided to get the Sapphire 7950 Vapor-X version.

Games that sent my previous card into the 60 odd degrees and the fan spinning like mad barely break the 50 degree mark with the fan spinning at around 35% and completely inaudible.

The card is running at:
GPU Clock 950
Memory Clock 5000
VDDC 1250

There is still room for further overclocking but I have not found anything that warrants it. I only have it running at the values I stated to test the stability of the card and will probably reduce the values back to stock again. The card at the values stated above runs at 43 degrees and the fan runs at 32% when I am just doing normal stuff like watching videos.

I'm very happy with it.