When Stephen Harper won the 41st Canadian general election and became the Prime Minister for the third time in five years, political commentators on TV praised him for his very well presented victory speech. But why are we praising someone who didn't even write the speech in the first place? The answer to this question is actually quite simple, but requires some food for thought. So let's put it this way: Give the same speech to people like you or me. Unless your name happens to be Stephen J. Harper, just because we have the same draft on hand, does not mean we can present it as well as the next. In the same way, we all know there are a billion versions of the same video card in the market today. Whether it is ASUS or MSI or HIS or PowerColor or Gigabyte, they all have all have some kind of AMD or NVIDIA GPU in the middle, and none of the board manufacturers had any hand in the design of the GPU. So what makes you want to buy a Gigabyte video card over, say, an ASUS variant, even though they are both Radeon 6870s? Other than the usual price and warranty factors, stuff like the included cooler plays a role, too. The Gigabyte Radeon HD 6870 1GB SOC we are reviewing today is a great example of what makes a run-of-the-mill graphics card unique among the competition. Combined with high quality electronic components and a hardcore looking WindForce 3X triple fan heatsink, how well does this "super" overclock version of AMD's excellent Radeon 6870 GPU step up against its competitors? We took one in and fired up our test platform for some benchmarking fun. Read on to see why we like this card so much!



Link: APH Networks