A high-end graphics card that will most probably come factory overclocked

Feb 9, 2012 08:00 GMT  ·  By

PowerColor is currently working on yet another graphics card based on the Radeon HD 7970 GPU, which will use an in-house developed cooler meant to make PowerColor’s solution more efficient than AMD’s reference design.

The yet unnamed graphics card was recently pictured by TechPowerUp and it seems to resemble quite a lot last year’s Devil 13 HD 6970.

The most obvious similarity between the two is the presence of the dual 92mm fans, which in the HD 7970 card, just as in the Devil13, are accompanied by four large copper heatpipes with an 8mm diameter which have the task of drawing the heat away from the GPU and into a large aluminum heatsink.

This covers most of the card’s PCB and is topped by a black, with some bluish accents, plastic shroud meant to direct the fan airflow downwards.

Right now, the clock speeds of PowerColor’s card are not known yet, but judging by the powerful cooler used, we would say there is a strong chance for the card to come factory overclocked.

The AMD Radeon HD 7970 is based on the Tahiti XT core that 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 that runs at 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective), while the stock GPU frequency is set at 925MHz.

Some factory overclocked HD 7970’s however have the core running at speeds up to 1GHz, which brings quite an important boost in performance.

No information regarding the shipping date or the pricing of PowerColor’s upcoming Radeon HD 7970 solution was provided. AMD’s MSRP for the Radeon HD 7970 is set at $549.99 (433 EUR).