The HD 7970 receives yet another waterblock, this time from Swiftech

Feb 3, 2012 00:41 GMT  ·  By

Computer enthusiasts who are into liquid cooling and want to purchase AMD’s most powerful graphics card, the Radeon HD 7970, now have a reason to rejoice as Swiftech has announced that it is working on its first waterblock specially designed to fit this high-end solution.

The full-coverage block is made using a copper base and a brushed aluminum top and should be compatible with all the Radeon HD 7970 models that follow AMD’s reference printed circuit board (PCB) layout.

Right now, this would mean basically every Radeon HD 7970 that is available on the market, as no manufacturer has yet customized the card to this extent.

According to a post by Swiftech’s CEO, made on the XtremeSystems forums, the waterblock was designed so that it would cover not only the Tahiti XT GPU, but also the memory, VRM and I/O chips.

Furthermore, the waterblock will come bundled with a brushed aluminum black anodized back plate, which should bring some additional stiffness to the Radeon HD 7970.

Those of you looking to install the HD 7970 as part of a CrossFireX setup will also be glad to know that the Swiftech waterblock is compatible with 2-way and 4-way multi-GPU configurations via a special bridge.

Officially introduced in the second part of December 2011, AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 is based on the company’s Graphics Core Next architecture and is the first graphics card to be manufactured using the 28nm production process.

At its heart, the card packs 32 Compute Units for a total of 2048 stream cores that are joined by 128 texture units, 32 ROP units and a 384-bit wide memory bus.

This connects the GPU to 3GB of GDDR5 video buffer, which runs at 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective), while the graphics core’s operating frequency is set at 925MHz.

Swiftech expects the Komodo HD7970 waterblock to be ready in the fourth week of February, but pricing hasn’t been disclosed.

Photo Gallery (3 Images)

Swiftech Komodo HD7970 waterclock
Swiftech Komodo HD7970 waterclock - BackplateSwiftech Komodo HD7970 waterclock
Open gallery