14 DAY TRIAL // Sapphire Technology is preparing to launch a custom designed version of AMD's top of the line Radeon HD 6970 graphics card, the very first pictures depicting this yet unnamed model making their way onto the Web.
Compared to the reference HD 6970, Sapphire's GPU uses a slightly revised cooling system that should offer, at least in theory, improved thermal and acoustic performance.
In addition, the card features a blue PCB that probably underwent some changes in order to offer improved power delivery.
Unfortunately, no specific details about the card are available at this time, except for the pictures provided.
The Radeon HD 6970 is AMD's most powerful graphics card available at this time, and is based on the Cypress architecture that moved from the regular VLIW5 arrangement used by the company for its GPUs since the days of the R600 to a VLIW4 shader arrangement.
This allows for about the same performance as before while also reducing the complexity of AMD's stream processors and saving some transistor space.
In comparison to the previous Evergreen GPU family, Cayman also features improved tessellation performance, dual graphics engines, redesigned ROP units and the UVD 3.0 media engine.
Moving to the HD 6970, the card packs 1536 stream processors, 96 texturing units, 32 ROPs and a 256-bit memory bus that connects to 2GB of video buffer.
The reference version of the GPU has its clocks set at 880MHz for the core and 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective) for the memory, but is highly likely that Sapphire went with increased frequencies for its upcoming HD 6970.
Connectivity wise, the card carries two DVI ports, one HDMI 1.4a port as well as a pair of mini DisplayPort 1.2 outputs.
Sapphire's video card is bundled together with the company's proprietary TriXX tweaking utility, its price and release date not being known at this time. (via 3Dnews)
