The shelf price of the AMD Radeon HD 7900 cards could get lower

Jan 16, 2012 22:51 GMT  ·  By

Chinese graphics solution maker Yeston has a long tradition of developing custom PCBs for the video cards it produces, and recently the company has started to develop an in-house Radeon HD 7970/7950 printed circuit board that is supposed to lower the production costs of AMD’s cards.

The PCB was pictured by Expreview and is based on a 8+1+1 phase VRM, consisting of cost-effective ferrite core chokes, LFPAK MOSFETs, and probably a UPI-made VRM controller.

Power will be delivered to the card via the standard 8-pin and 6-pin PCI Express connectors, but in an attempt to cut production costs even more, Yeston has decided to remove the dual-BIOS feature present in AMD’s Radeon HD 7900-series solutions.

In the final design, the PCB will be paired together with a top-flow cooler which has provided enough space for a pair of DVI connectors, one HDMI 1.4a port and one DisplayPort 1.2 output.

Yeston didn’t say when the first cards based on this new PCB will arrive into the market, or for how much will they retail, but we hope that the savings made on the PCB design will actually lower the retail price of the cards using it.

The Radeon HD 7970 is based on AMD’s new Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, that replaces the previous VLIW4 design and was built for the ground up to increase GPU computing performance.

In the Tahiti XT core this 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 which runs at 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective), while the stock GPU frequency is set at 925MHz.

As far as pricing is concerned, AMD’s MSRP for the Radeon HD 7970 is set at $549.99 (433 EUR), while the recommended pricing of the HD 7950 is not yet known.

Photo Gallery (3 Images)

yeston Radeon HD 7970/7950 low-cost PCB
yeston Radeon HD 7970/7950 low-cost PCB - Backyeston Radeon HD 7970/7950 low-cost PCB - VRMs
Open gallery