AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB Graphics Card Review

Being a reference card and receiving it for launch, as always, no packaging or little goodies come included, but rest assured that as the AMD partners or AIB’s get their hands on them for the 9th January partner launch, we’ll see a lot more on offer and hopefully some custom cooler designs. For now however, we have a reference design that includes the patented red and black colour scheme that made ATI famous many moons ago. The cooler covers the whole card from end to end and is glossy making it a sucker for fingerprints. It features the same style fan that we’ve seen on previous generation cards which pushes the hot air towards the rear of the card.

Power connector wise, we see nothing dissimilar from the 6970 with a 6-pin connector and 8-pin PCI-Express connector to give maximum power to this card.

Also along the top of the card we find two CrossFire connectors for maximising the potential behind multiple GPU configurations. We also see just in front of these connectors is a BIOS switch, much like we saw on the 6900 series cards.

On the 6900 series cards, we typically found five display outputs, though the reference 7970 only sees four connectors being included. This time around, we only have a single dual-link DVI port, a single HDMI port and two mini DisplayPorts. Even with this amount of connectors, we still have the facility to enable AMD Eyefinity technology to give the very best experience in gaming. You can expect all of these ports to be mixed up and expanded upon when the likes of Sapphire give their model the “FleX” treatment, among other brands.

Being a new card in our hands, we were keen to see how the cooler has changed from the last model. Taking the cooler apart takes some steady handwork and lots of screws, and it all splits apart nicely. We’re told by AMD that this is their 6th generation vapour chamber design which allows for better airflow and quieter noise output. We can see that the fan sits towards the end of the card, with a large vapour chamber heatsink next to it. It’s laid out in such a way that the fan can blow hot air across the heatsink which is then exhausted out of the rear of the card, and out of your chassis.

The rear of the cooler shows that the vapour chamber heatsink has a copper base which makes direct contact with the GPU. There are also several cooling pads which make contact with the memory of the card.

Looking at the card laid bare, we can see there is a lot of space for AMD partners to play around with, which should leave for some interesting results as custom designed cards are released. The GPU is covered by a metal shell and includes the Hyinx GDDR5 memory surrounding around it.

The core, as expained, is based on the new AMD Tahiti core and so far has seen some amazing results when looking at how far it can be pushed by some of the best overclockers in the business.

Until the AMD partners release overclocked versions, we find the stock, reference card using a 925MHz core clock and 1375MHz (5.5Gbps Effective). Talk about how far this card can be pushed is all over the web at the moment, and we can only assume that good things are still yet to come.