14 DAY TRIAL // Well-known mainboard manufacturer, Taiwanese company Gigabyte has finally started shipping its own AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition video card flagship. The new card is powered by AMD’s famous “Tahiti 2” GPU, but it doesn’t come clocked at reference 1 GHz like it was previously thought, but at a high 1100 MHz.
Thus, we can see that the well-built WindForce3X cooling system has allowed the manufacturer to ship the new GV-R797TO-3GD video card with a 10% higher default GPU frequency when compared with AMD’s reference Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition.
The WindForce3X cooling system features three 80-millimeter fans and it’s a little quieter than the reference design from AMD itself.
The card comes with the same 3 GB GDDR5 video memory that we can find on any HD 7970 video card, but this time, the new GHz Edition BIOS is clocking the memory at 1500 MHz or 6 GHz effective frequency.
The “Tahiti 2” GPU is based on the company’s new Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture and 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.
The GCN architecture has proved to be very good in GPU compute applications and, surprisingly, it comes with more than 1 TFLOP of double-precision floating point performance.
This is more than ten times the DP FP64 performance of Nvidia’s Kepler.
Gigabyte’s new offering has reportedly just appeared in shops halfway around the world in the Land of the Rising Sun.
The price is set quite high at $634 (€511), but novelties are always a little bit overpriced in Japan.
The card is backed by Gigabyte’s standard 3-year warranty and comes with various overclocking features.
