14 DAY TRIAL // Now that Advanced Micro Devices has finally started shipping its high-end Radeon HD 7970 graphics card, it only makes sense that its partners, in this case MSI, follow suit.
Micro-Star International has just made the official announcement of the R7970-2PMD3G5 graphics adapter.
Essentially, it is a rebranding of the reference card, albeit designed with all-solid capacitors and bundled with the Afterburner overclocking utility.
Given MSI's history, it is clear enough that a factory-overclocked model will show up at some point in the near future.
For now, though, the company is content with letting buyers adjust the core voltage and, thus, overclock the GPU themselves if they really want to.
The Radeon HD 7970 was formally launched on December 22, but has only now begun to sell.
The GPU frequency is 925 MHz, while the 3GB of GDDR5 VRAM operate at a clock speed of 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective).
In other words, the R7970-2PMD3G5 will breeze through even the most demanding of games without breaking a sweat, overclocking or no.
Furthermore, the memory interface is of 384 bits while 2,048 stream processors, 128 texture units and 32 compute units round up the spec list.
That said, MSI used all-solid capacitors when it built the video board, for increased stability and extended product lifespan.
Other specifications include DisplayPort 1.2, HDMI 1.4a, stereoscopic 3D capability, compatibility with the PCI Express Gen 3 standard and, of course, support for the Eyefinity multi-monitor technology.
All in all, the video controller is supposed to achieve a performance of 3.79TFLOPs all on its own, a clear jump from the 2.7TFLOPs of the HD 6970 (bandwidth is 264GB/s, much higher than 170 GB/s)
The press release did not include the price of this 28nm GPU-based product, but it is easy enough to guess that, even with all-solid capacitors, it won't go much higher than $549 (443-440 Euro).