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HIS have had an unhealthy fascination for years with sword imagery. The front of the HIS HD7970 box features what we can only assume is the sword of Excalibur being forced into a rock, and shattering elements everywhere. It sounds dramatic, but is also sadly, instantly forgettable.
The HIS bundle includes literature on the card, several video converters, and their ‘weight lifter' device. We have seen this plastic stand supplied with a few other HIS graphics cards.
The ‘weight lifter' fits inside your case and can be extended vertically to help hold/support the graphics card in the PCIE slot. The HD7970 isn't that heavy a card mind you, but as a bundle extra it is certainly a talking point.
The HIS HD7970 is an AMD reference card with two HIS stickers on the cooler. One of these stickers is in the center of the fan. The other sticker is actually mounted upside down on our sample and looks like an afterthought.
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 AMD HD7970 is Crossfire capable in 2, 3 and 4 way configurations.
The HIS 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.
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.
