14 DAY TRIAL // On January 9, AMD will make available the recently introduced Radeon HD 7970 and in preparation for this launch the company is rumored to have made the FOB price of the graphics card $50 lower (about 38.6 EUR).
FOB stands for “fright on board” and is a commercial term used to describe the price of the product including loading costs, while shipment costs are supported by the buyer.
The $50 price cut that was rumored by Donanim Haber could take the FOB pricing of the Radeon HD 7970 from the current $525 down to $475 (406 to 367 EUR).
This doesn’t however mean that the Radeon HD 7970 will now retail for $475 as the shipping costs and other expenses added to the card’s price will most definitely get it over the $500 mark.
Furthermore, Legit Review’s sources don’t have any knowledge of this presumed price drop, and still expect the Radeon HD 7970 to be listed for $550 when they go on sale next week.
The Radeon HD 7970 was introduced by AMD in late December 2011 and it’s the company’s first graphics card to be based on the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.
At its heart stands the Tahiti XT GPU 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 which runs at 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective), while the stock GPU frequency is set at 925MHz.
According to AMD’s estimates, the HD 7970 should be able to deliver a whopping 3.79TFLOPs of computing performance, compared to 2.7TFLOPs of the HD 6970, while the memory bandwidth available reaches 264GB/sec, a significant jump over the 176GB/sec of the 6970.
The graphics card will start arriving into retail in just a few days from now, on January 9.