AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Review

Our sample arrived a while ago from AMD headquarters, and as such there is no retail packaging or accessories to list. The card itself looks identical to the original HD7970, measuring 275mm. Sadly AMD haven't opted for a larger centrally mounted fan, however we expect partners to enhance the cooling solution over the coming months.

It is built around a dark PCB with a yellow engineering sample sticker on the rear.

This is a two slot card built around the red and black plastic reference cooler we have seen many times before. This card is Crossfire capable in 2, 3 and 4 way configurations. There is also a bios switch close by.

The card has a full sized DVI and HDMI port, next to two mini DisplayPorts. AMD allow all outputs to be used simultaneously. Warm air is pushed outside the case via the upper holes, cut into the I/O panel.

This card requires power from an 8 pin and 6 pin PCI E connector.

AMD's reference cooler has a copper base and directly cools all the memory, which is high grade HYNIX GDDR5. The single red fan is positioned at the far side of the cooler to force air across the full length of the PCB.

An overview of the HD7970 GHZ Edition, built around the 28nm Tahiti core. The card is clocked at 1050mhz, with memory set at 1,500mhz (6Gbps effective). The 3GB of GDDR5 memory is connected via a 384 bit memory interface, delivering a staggering 288 GB/s of memory bandwidth. There are dual geometry engines, eight render back ends, 2048 unified shaders, 32 color ROPs per clock and 128 Z/stencil ROPs per clock.

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