14 DAY TRIAL // Wanting to improve the reference Radeon HD 7970 design, PowerColor has developed a custom version of AMD’s graphics card that packs both an improved cooling system as well as an in-house designed PCB.
The so called Radeon HD 7970 Vortex II was presented by PowerColor at this year’s CES fair and on a first look it resembles quite a lot last year’s Devil 13 HD 6970.
The most obvious resemblance between them is the presence of the two 92mm fans, which in the Vortex II, just as in the Devil13, are accompanied by four large copper heatpipes with an 8mm diameter which have the task of drawing the heat away from the GPU and into a large aluminum heatsink.
In the case of the Vortex II this covers most of the card’s PCB and is topped by a black, with some reddish accents, plastic shroud meant to direct the fan airflow downwards.
If we were to remove the whole cooling assembly, we would see that the card PCB was also redesigned by PowerColor to feature dual 8-pin PCIe power pugs and an 8-phase VRM.
According to Hardware.fr, this will allow PowerColor to ship its card factory overclocked by as much as 25%.
No information regarding the shipping date or the pricing of PowerColor’s Radeon HD 7970 Vortex II was provided.
The AMD Radeon HD 7970 is based on the Tahiti XT core 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. AMD’s MSRP for the Radeon HD 7970 is set at $549.99 (433 EUR).
