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This HD7970 arrives in a box with the same ‘Lord Of The Rings' style artwork we have seen before with other Asus graphics cards. An angry looking dude with giant sword takes centerstage on the front of the box. Not the greatest box artwork.
Inside, the product is protected under cardboard with thick foam side panels. Asus bundle several video and power converters, a Crossfire cable and literature on the product with a software/driver disc. As always we recommend you get the drivers direct from the AMD website as the files on the disc could be several revisions out of date.
The Asus HD7970 is based solely on the AMD reference design with ASUS branding on the cooler . The reference HD7970 has received a cooling upgrade, which is long overdue. The fan is wider, with a new blade design which is said to deliver lower noise emissions with enhanced cooling efficiency. Thanks to the wider blades, airflow has also been improved.
The Asus card is Crossfire capable in 2, 3 and 4 way configurations.
The HD7970 requires power from a 6 pin and an 8 pin connector.
The card is a dual slot design with a full sized DVI and HDMI port, and two mini Display Port connectors. It is Eyefinity capable and can power up to 6 displays. The HD7970 is the first GPU that can simultaneously output multiple, independent audio streams from the HDMI and mini Displayport connectors at the rear of the card. This is also the first GPU to support 3GHz HDMI with frame packing support for Stereo 3D.
The Tahiti core is protected under a partial cover. The memory onboard is high specification Hynix GDDR5. AMD are using a Chil controller, which is a dual loop 6+2 multiphase PWM design. This offers dynamic voltage control and features input voltage management, allowing up to three input voltages to be monitored to ensure adequate power is delivered to suit the load.
The HD7970 is built from 4.3 billion 28nm transistors.
This card features a dual BIOS toggle switch. Setting 1 is the unprotected mode allowing the end user to create their own bios configuration. Setting 2 is the factory default.
Holy power draw Batman. The system set up in a 3 way CrossfireX configuration. The HD7970 Tahiti core operates at 925mhz, and the 3GB of GDDR 5 memory runs at 1375mhz (5.5Gbps effective) which is connected via a 384 bit interface for over 264GB/sec of bandwidth. The card features 2,048 stream processors, is fully PCI E Gen3 compliant (up to 32 gb/s of data bandwidth) and incorporates new AMD Powertune and ZeroCore power technology. There are dual geometry engines, eight render back ends, 32 color ROPs per clock and 128 Z/stencil ROPs per clock.
