PowerColor Radeon HD 7970 Vortex II Details Exposed

The fact that AMD’s Tahiti chip is very overclockable allows video card manufacturers to offer PC enthusiasts like us powerful factory overclocked cards such as PowerColor’s Radeon HD 7970 Vortex II that comes with a manually adjustable cooler.

To make some marketing waves before the official launch of the card, PowerColor has apparently leaked some new pictures with their new AMD Radeon HD 7970 based product.

On the technical side, PowerColor has also revealed the card's working frequencies. The GPU is clocked at 1100MHz and that’s a huge increase from the factory default of 925 MHz.

This is almost a 19% overclock and will likely bring at least a 9% improvement in benchmarks.

The 3GB of onboard GDDR5 memory is also overclocked from the reference 5500 MHz stock clock to 5700 MHz, but this should be further increased by the overclockers buying this product to make sure the card really takes advantage of the high clock of the GPU.

The cooling systems consists of two fans that blow air over a nickel-plated heastsink containing three heat pipes; one oriented towards the card’s left side and the other two placed towards the mid and right side of the card.

There is no way to direct the flow of hot air towards the outside of the case so the buyer should make sure that his system has good exhaust ventilation.

The card will occupy two slots into your case as shown in the pictures, and the back of the card is covered by a black metallic plate that should help with the heat dissipation and offer better structural integrity for the product.

PowerColor’s new toy comes with the standard 2048 Stream Processors, a 384-bit wide memory BUS, PCI-Express 3.0 compliance and x16 BUS interface, CrossFire and Eyefinity support along with five display outputs: two DVI connectors, one HDMI and two mini DisplayPort.

As is the case with most high-end products, all the capacitors on the card are solid ones.