14 DAY TRIAL // At the start of the week, we said that the AMD Radeon HD 9000 graphics card series was set for release in October 2013.
Sapphire, one of AMD's partners, seems to be moving faster than the rest though.
Basically, the company is already allowing select customers to test the strongest member of that collection: Radeon HD 9970 “Curacao XT.”
Currently, only pre-production models have been made, but they are better than nothing.
According to Chiphell website, the card has a 12-layer PCB (Radeon HD 7970 has 10-layer PCB), a 512-bit memory interface, two CrossFireX connectors, a dual-fan cooler (4-way multi-GPU technology supported) and 250W thermal design power, probably (TDP).
That said, two power plugs (a 6-pin and an 8-pin PCI Express power ports) are located on the top edge of the video board.