14 DAY TRIAL // A new series of pictures showcasing AMD’s next-generation Radeon HD 7970 graphics card were just published online presenting it in much more detail than before.
The images were posted on the Chinese Chiphell forum and present both the front as well as the back of the graphcis card, including the rear of its printed circuit board (PCB).
As those of you familiar with the Radeon HD 7970 will be quick to point out, the pictures provided seem to be consistent with the card depicted in the AMD presentations slides leaked to the web in these last few days.
What is strange however, is that unlike what we were told so far, the card seems to pack two 8-pin PCIe power connectors and not an 8-pin and a 6-pin as previously thought, but this could be just something AMD decide to include in its engineering samples.
For those of you in need of a quick refresher you should know that the Radeon HD 7970 is based on the Tahiti XT core.
According to a recent leak this GPU feature 32 Compute Units, for a total of 2048 streaming cores, 128 texture units, 32 ROPs and a 384-bit wide memory bus.
This will be connected to 3GB of GDDR VRAM working at 1.37GHz (5.5GHz effective), while the GPU will be clocked at 925MHz.
The load TDP of the Radeon HD 7970 is rated at 300W while the idle board power is rated at an incredibly low 3W thanks to AMD’s ZeroCore technology, which completely turns off the card when the system is in idle with the monitor shut down.
AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 is expected to be announced on December 22, with availability being scheduled for January of 2012.
