14 DAY TRIAL // For a while now, video card makers have struggled to install as much memory as possible in their graphics cards, but Sapphire seems ready to take this game to a whole new level with the 6GB VRAM packing Toxic Radeon HD 7970 it presented during this year’s CeBIT fair.
At a first look, Sapphire’s latest creation doesn’t seem to differ all that much from the company’s other HD 7970 solutions, but the card had to go through a number of modifications in order to allow 6GB of VRAM to be installed.
The regular AMD Radeon HD 7970 design utilizes twelve 2Gbit GDDR5 memory chips to achieve 3GB of memory across a 384-bit wide memory interface.
This means that in order for Sapphire to double the amount of video buffer present, the company would have to go for 4Gbit GDDR5 memory chips.
However, such chips are not available in bulk at this point in time, so the only other solution left to Sapphire was to piggyback two 2Gbit chips across each 32-bit path available in the Radeon HD 7970 memory controller.
As a result, the Toxic Radeon HD 7970 has memory chips on both sides of the PCB, according to ComputerBase, with the rear ones being cooled by an aluminum back-plate.
The extra cooling is necessary since the Toxic Radeon HD 7970 doesn’t run the VRAM at AMD’s stock 1,375GHz (5.5GHz effective) frequency, but rather at a full 1,500MHz (6GHz data rate).
In addition to the memory, the GPU operating speed was also increased from the stock 925MHz to 1100MHz.
Furthermore, those who need even more power can get a further speed boost by selecting an overclocked BIOS profile that raises the graphics core frequency to 1150MHz.
No details regarding the availability or the pricing of the Sapphire Toxic Radeon HD 7970 are available right now, but don’t expect the extra 3GB of VRAM to come in cheap.
Why anyone would need such a high amount of memory in a single-GPU graphics card is debatable at best, but as long as there’s demand for such a product we can’t blame Sapphire for building it.
