Available both as an upgrade for the company's desktops and as a standalone product

Jan 30, 2012 20:01 GMT  ·  By

With AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 now available in retail, system builders have started integrating this monster of a graphics card in their systems and one of the latest companies to do so is AVADirect, who has added AMD’s latest creation as an option for its gaming desktops.

Officially introduced in the second part of December 2011, AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 is based on the company’s Graphics Core Next architecture and is the first graphics card to be manufactured using the 28nm production process.

At its heart, the card packs 32 Compute Units for a total of 2048 stream cores that are joined by 128 texture units, 32 ROP units and a 384-bit wide memory bus.

This connects the GPU to 3GB of GDDR5 video buffer, which runs at 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective), while the graphics core’s operating frequency is set at 925MHz.

In AVADirect’s desktops, the powerful AMD graphics card can be paired with Intel LGA 1155 or LGA 2011 processors, as well as with AMD’s own FX-Series CPUs, which can be either air- or water-cooled.

Furthermore, users can also choose to customize the system with up to 32GB of system memory, high-end power supplies, as well as with a second or third Radeon HD 7970 for CrossFireX operation (available only in select systems).

Besides offering the Radeon HD 7970 as an upgrade in its custom desktops, AVADirect also sells AMD’s graphics card as a standalone product.

Three models are available right now, from Asus, Sapphire and XFX, with prices ranging from $651.92 to $691.76 (493 to 523 EUR).

AVADirect will continue to add new HD 7970 graphics cards, from various manufacturers, as they become available.

Since December last year, the Radeon HD 7970's have been quite scarce, but according to AMD we will now begin to see more cards make their way into retail in the coming weeks.