Won't arrive until January of next year, together with the other HD 7970 cards

Dec 22, 2011 13:32 GMT  ·  By

Just a few hours have passed since AMD made official the Radeon HD 7970 graphics core, and Club3D has already announced a new card based on this design that is expected to arrive on January 9, 2012.

Club3D graphics card doesn’t seem to differ in any way from AMD’s reference design for the HD 7970, which was to be expected as graphics chip makers usually force their partners to adopt this design in the first few months after a new high-end GPU is released.

That being said, the reference cooler developed by AMD is quite capable, judging by the HD 7970 reviews that have popped us so far, as it manages to chill the card without producing too much noise.

Of course that the 28nm fabrication process used for the Tahiti XT GPU also takes some of the credit for this feat, since it enabled AMD to build a much larger core without having to increase the TDP over that of previous generation cards.

Speaking of the Tahiti XT core, this includes 32 Compute Units for a total of 2048 stream processors that are joined by 128 texture units, 32 ROP units and a 384-bit wide memory bus.

This is linked to 3GB of GDDR5 video buffer memory which runs at 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective), while the stock GPU frequency is set at 925MHz.

Club3D chose not to go past these values, so its card follows these specifications to the letter, but overclocking the graphics card on your own should be easy once the right tools arrive.

As most of you know by now, the Radeon HD 7970 launch which took place earlier today was just a paper release, so the Club3D card won’t actually arrive in stores until January 9, together with the rest of the solutions based on AMD’s latest graphics core. According to VideoCardz.com pricing will be set at $549 (420 EUR).

UPDATE: At the request of Club3D we removed the picture of the card from our article. The card however looked identical with the reference Radeon HD 7970 pictured here, the only difference being that it featured Club3D's trefoil logo placed on the blower fan.