Asus’ DirectCU II graphics cards have long been among the best in the industry, so many will rejoice when hearing that the Taiwanese company is getting ready a highly customized version of the Radeon HD 7970 for being released into this series.
The card in question will be called the HD 7970 DirectCU II Top and just like its predecessors it features a massive tri-slot cooler, a highly customized PCB and a series of other overclocking optimizations.
These include a series of voltage measurement points, a 12-phase VRM circuitry with supper alloy caps and chocks as well as a special SAP capacitor added to maximize overclocking headroom according to
Asus.
The tri-slot cooling system is also just as impressive since it uses two 100mm fans sitting on top of a massive aluminum heatsink, while most of the PCB is covered with an aluminum heatspreader.
Asus says its design keeps the core 20% cooler than AMD’s reference design, which allowed the company to push the Radeon HD 7970 over its reference frequencies so the GPU will be clocked at an impressive 1GHz while the memory will work at 1400MHz (5.6Gbps data rate).
The video connector configuration of the HD 7970 DirectCU II Top was also modified by Asus, its
graphics card coming with two DVI outputs (one DVI-I and one DVI-D) as well as with four DisplayPort connectors.
This design change allows for up to six displays to be connected in Eyefinity mode, Asus also providing its users with a DVI to HDMI adapter, according to the info provided by
SweClockers.
Asus’ HD 7970 DirectCU II Top is expected to arrive sometime during next month and in Sweden it will retail for 5,500 Kronor, which translates into about 500 EUR or $644 US after excluding VAT.
AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 is based on the Tahiti XT core, which 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 DDR5 video memory and the GPU is manufactured using TSMC’s advanced 28nm node which enables it to be one of the coolest and most energy efficient high-end graphics card around.
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