AMD Radeon HD 7970 review - Product Showcase

Product Showcase

So, pictures then, below you can see the Radeon HD 7970, this is a 3GB model. We expect the product to retail for roughly 500 EUR or 549 USD in the initial launch phase, we hope price will level in a few weeks but that will depend on availability versus volume. Included with all cards will be manual and a demo and driver CD, power converters and an monitor connector converters to get your Eyefinity freak on.

Overall a nice and dark/red looking card with what you may expect from AMD. The 4.3 Billion transistor encounting 28nm Tahiti based core is tied to a whopping 3GB memory. The reference cards are clocked at a 925 MHz core frequency and the GDDR5 memory runs at 5.5 Gbps (effective data rate as GDDR5 has a quad data-rate, so effectively that quadruples that number).

Here we can see the backside, the card will fit pretty much any chassis as its 27cm in length. The backside of the PCB shows a very non-complex design, that's typically a very good sign.

AMD allows you to opt for the multi-GPU road with Crossfire(X) as an option. You can pair two, three or even four cards in one PC and have them do a decent workout. By the way I get this question all the time, but Crossfire is setting the same cards up in multi-GPU mode, and CrossfireX is mixing different cards say 6970 and 7970 and set them up in Crossfire mode.

If you peek to the right of the PCB on the photo in-between the 1 and 2 position you'll notice a Switch, it's actually a Dual BIOS toggle switch. Setting two returns the card to factory default, setting 1 is an unprotected mode which allows you to overclock and tweak.

The reference R7970 has a maximum power consumption of roughly 210 Watts, our measurements actually show numbers below that value. The boards overall power consumption from idle to load is excellent really.

You will need to hook the card up to your power supply with a 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe PEG connector. We recommend a 550W power supply to start with, with one card of course.