More than a month after AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 reached retail, add-in board makers still come out with new solutions based on this graphics card design, the latest to do so being PowerColor which just launched the HD7970 Dual Fan.
The card is based on a proprietary PowerColor design and includes two large fans (presumably 92mm), backed by some pretty thick copper heatpipes, for dissipating the heat produced by the card while running.
Despite the improved cooling system,
PowerColor chose not to overclock the card past AMD’s reference frequencies thus the HD 7970 Tahiti XT GPU is run at 925MHz, while the video buffer is clocked at the usual 1,375MHz (5.5GHz).
The video output configuration was also left unaltered, so this latest PowerColor creation packs a DVI port, an HDMI output as well as two miniDP connectors.
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 GDDR5 video buffer memory and the GPU is manufactured using the 28nm fabrication process which enables the Radeon HD 7970 to be one of the coolest and most energy efficient high-end graphics card around.
Performance wise, tests have shown that the stock HD 7970 is on average 15-25% faster than Nvidia's GTX 580, this difference growing at high resolutions. Through overclocking however the gap between these two solutions can become even larger.
PowerColor hasn’t released any details regarding the pricing or availability of the HD7970 Dual Fan.
However, given its custom
cooler, we expect this graphics card to surpass AMD’s recommended $449 US (roughly 340 EUR) price tag.
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