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Last month Sapphire released one of the finest video cards we have ever tested … their state of the art 6GB HD7970 Toxic Edition, with custom PCB design, proprietary cooler and ‘Lethal boost' overclocking feature. Today we look at the HIS 7970 X Turbo 3GB IceQ X2 which looks to be following the same design concept … to create a video card with no compromises.
Following the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition is a tall order for HIS.
When Sapphire had finished modifying the reference AMD HD7970 it was barely recognisable. Noise levels and temperatures both dropped, clock speeds were massively increased, and performance was in a completely different ballpark. The 6GB Toxic Edition card could even give the overclocked GTX680's a run for their money … not something I would have imagined before I started the review.
The HIS 7970 X Turbo 3GB IceQ X2 features a two fan cooler spanning the full length of the PCB. Let us take a quick look at the specifications.
| Product | AMD HD7970 GHZ Ed HIS 7970 X Turbo 3GB IceQ X2 |
AMD HD7950 | AMD HD7870 | AMD HD7850 |
| Core Clock speed | 1050mhz (1180mhz) |
800mhz | 1000mhz | 860mhz |
| Transistors | 4.31 billion | 4.31 billion | 2.8 billion | 2.8 billion |
| Stream Processors | 2,048 | 1,792 | 1,280 | 1,024 |
| Compute Performance | 3.79 TFLOPS | 2.87 TFLOPS | 2.56 TFLOPS | 1.76 TFLOPS |
| Texture Units | 128 | 112 | 80 | 64 |
| Texture Fillrate | 134.4 GT/s 151 GT/s |
89.6 GT/s | 80 GT/s | 55.0 GT/s |
| ROPs | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 |
| Pixel Fillrate | 33.6 GP/s 37.8 GP/s |
25.6 GP/s | 32.0 GP/s | 27.52 GP/s |
| Z/Stencil | 128 | 128 | 128 | 128 |
| Memory Type | 3GB GDDR5 | 3GB GDDR5 | 2GB GDDR5 | 2GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Clock | 1,500mhz |
1,250mhz | 1,200mhz | 1,200mhz |
| Memory Data Rate | 6 GBps | 5.0 Gbps | 4.8 Gbps | 4.8 Gbps |
| Memory Bandwidth | 288 GB/s | 240 GB/s | 153.6 GB/s | 153.6 GB/s |
HIS have overclocked the 7970 X Turbo to 1180mhz, which is just shy of the 1,200mhz set by the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition. Unlike Sapphire however, HIS have decided to cut the cost a little by holding true to AMD's reference specifications, incorporating 3GB of GDDR5 memory, not 6GB.
