SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 7970 3GB Video Card OC with Boost $299 AR ($20 Rebate)

[missalaire]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202008

[mkawa]

one thing to keep in mind that caused me to spend an extra few hundred dollars (:|) is that the sapphire cards don't have an efi boot block. of the 79xx vendors, the only manufacturer that consistently has been shipping with uefi support is gigabyte.

oddly, this doesn't matter for uefi booting on all boards, but it _does_ matter on all boards with AMI uefis (asrock, asus). for whatever reason, intel's own branded boards have uefi bootloaders that don't care and will happily boot into uefi without needing a specific vga bios. overall, ymmv.

that said, good card.

[Photoelectric]

I have the original version of Sapphire's Dual-X 7970 OC (black PCB), and I've been able to boot into BIOS without any issues with ASRock Z77.  The card is in another computer permanently, but I had it in the one with the ASRock motherboard a couple times for some comparison benchmarks--no problems there.

[mkawa]

yes, they boot fine in compatibility (ie, non UEFI mode) or with BIOS. this really only matters if you want uefi compliance (particularly with an NT8.0 or linux kernel), and to boot off of volumes > 2tb. (ie, GPT boot support)