14 DAY TRIAL // HIS is working on a new custom design for Radeon HD 7970 video card that will utilize the company’s next-generation IceQ X2 cooling system in order to deliver quieter operation and lower running temperatures than AMD’s reference card.
Just exposed by Expreview, the X2 is the first cooling solution in the IceQ family to use a dual fan design and it occupies two slots inside the system case.
The fans measure a massive 112mm in diameter and are placed on top of a large fin array which draws the heat away from the GPU via three 6mm and two 8mm nickel-plated copper heatpipes.
According to HIS, the end result is a cooler that is said to lower the operating temperatures of the card by up to 17° C while also being 15dB quieter.
The rest of the Radeon HD 7970 specifications are not known at this point in time, but the inclusion of the powerful IceQ X2 cooler seems to imply that the card will come factory overclocked.
In the stock version of the Radeon HD 7970 the Tahiti XT graphics core is clocked at 925MHz, while the memory runs at 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective).
Speaking of 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.
As many of you know, the Radeon HD 7970 is AMD’s highest performing graphics card to date and is based on the company’s Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.
The card is manufactured using TSMC’s advanced 28nm node, which enables it to be one of the coolest and most energy efficient high-end graphics solutions around.
When HIS introduces the Radeon HD 7970 IceQ X2, this will go head to head with other dual-fan HD 7970 video cards around such as MSI’s Twin Frozr III or Asus’s DirectCU II models.