What do you call a person who sets up three 32-inch 4K (that's 3840 x 2160 pixels each) side-by-side, pairs three of ASUS's HD 7970 GPUs together to play games using AMD's EyeInfinity technology, all of which costs a whopping $17,000? Insane is one word, rich another or a crazy gamer? Perhaps a mix of all the three.

The setup consists of three Sharp PN-K321 4K monitors connected to three AMD HD 7970 GPUs which are together capable of pushing a mind-blowing 1.5 billion pixels on the combined 12K screen resolution, together with a Power Supply Unit that conks off in a few minutes, perhaps just not able to bear the pure awesomeness of the setup. Oh, to get the setup working, AMD put together some custom drivers to make sure that EyeInfinity works well. Before using the custom drivers, the whole rig was able to pull together a measly 8 frames per second, to be more accurate, a slideshow.

Ahead of its April 24 launch, AMD board vendors has been distributing marketing materials to their retail partners. One such retailer in Japan revealed the flagship graphics card's specifications sheet, revealing details such as clock speeds and GPU core configuration.

To begin with, AMD isn't compromising much on clock speeds on the HD 7990 "Malta," in an effort to lower power draw. The card features GPU core clock speed of 1000 MHz, which puts it above the single-GPU Radeon HD 7970, but not much lower than the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, with its 1050 MHz. The memory is clocked at 6.00 GHz, on par with the HD 7970 GHz Edition, which yields a cumulative memory bandwidth of 576 GB/s.

According to the latest global graphics card market share seen by Taiwanese tech industry observer DigiTimes, Palit Microsystems and PC Partner have each surpassed ASUSTek. The two relegated ASUS to the position of third biggest graphics card vendor by volume. ASUS is a vendor-neutral graphics card vendor, selling both NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards; while Palit beat it with a predominantly GeForce-based product stack. Although Palit Microsystems is vendor-neutral on paper, it virtually stopped making AMD Radeon-based products.

Palit Microsystems runs two major brands, Palit, and Gainward, which target different global markets, and are seldom found in the same market. PC Partner, on the other hand, runs Sapphire, which focuses on AMD Radeon products, and ZOTAC, focusing on NVIDIA GeForce. Both Palit Microsystems and PC Partners also contract-manufacture graphics cards for other companies. With the surge of Palit Microsystems and PC Partner, ASUSTek is pushed down to the third place in global market-share, followed by MSI and GIGABYTE.

MSIs AM3+ mainboards support the latest AMD Vishera processors. In support of this fact is the recent overclocking record on the MSI 990FXA-GD80 which hit the 8.37 GHz mark with an FX-8350 processor, making it the fastest AMD FX-8350 in the world.

Additionally, the Z77 MPOWER and Big Bang-XPOWER II Mainboards have both made significant advancement in the HWBOT over-clocking leaderboards with MSI Lightning graphics cards. T0LSTY from Ukraine scored 18103 which puts him at the top of 3DMark 11 Performance Single Graphics Card scores with a Z77 MPOWER and R7970 Lightning and was the first contestant to break the 18,000 Marks barrier! T0LSTY, not satisfied with one record, also claimed the top spot in the Unigine Heaven DX11 single card benchmark.

Although the recent round of price-cuts by AMD covered mainly three SKUs, the HD 7970, HD 7950, and HD 7770; HIS put together its own list of price-cuts covering all Radeon HD 7000 series SKUs launched by it, including its non-reference design and overclocked ones. The new prices (in EUR, incl. taxes) are listed below.

• HIS 7750 iCooler 1GB GDDR5 PCI-E DP/DVI/HDM - 89,- Euro
• HIS 7770 iCooler 1GB GDDR5 PCI-E DVI/HDMI/2xMiniDP - 114,90 Euro
• HIS 7870 IceQ X Turbo 2GB GDDR5 PCI-E DVI/HDMI/2xMini DP - 299 Euro
• HIS 7870 IceQ Turbo 2GB GDDR5 PCI-E DVI/HDMI/2xMini DP - 309,90 Euro

MSI is working on a bleeding-edge Radeon HD 7870 graphics card that is both factory-overclocked, and has room for more overclocking. Called the MSI R7870 HAWK, pictured below, the card uses custom-design PCB and cooling by MSI. The PCB is augmented with a revamped VRM that takes advantage of MSI's GPU Reactor module (which conditions power), the PCB also features consolidated voltage measurement points. It draws power from two 6-pin PCIe power connectors. The cooler is MSI's TwinFrozr 4, similar in design to the one featured on R7970 Lightning, albeit slightly smaller, and with less-loud dash of blue color. Although not specifically known, the card is expected to come with factory overclocked speeds, with additional overclocking headroom. More details are awaited.

Thought the 1800/7700 MHz Radeon HD 7970 OC feat involving an MSI R7970 Lightning was impressive, wait till you see what the punters at EVGA, with K|ngp|n have in store. Armed with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 graphics cards, augmented by EVGA EPower board, and PrecisionX software, the EVGA GTX 680 was able to crack the 1800 MHz core frequency mark, reaching 1842 MHz, powered by a core voltage of 1.212V. Interestingly, the memory clock offset wasn't tinkered with. The rest of the system consisted of a Core i7-3960X clocked at ~5.50 GHz. The bench was stable enough to score 14912 points at 3DMark 11 (performance preset). Compare this, to the R7970 Lightning clocked at 1800 MHz core, 7.70 GHz memory (370 GB/s bandwidth), with no additional soldering except plugging in the GPU Reactor, and a slower Core i7-3960X CPU (clocked at 5.00 GHz), which went on to score P15035. Luckily for EVGA, the overclocking feat hasn't ended, and is still work in progress.

Here is the first picture of EVGA GeForce GTX 680. The best-selling GeForce AIC partner in the US, EVGA, opted for a minimalist sticker design, while sticking to NVIDIA reference board and cooler designs. In fact, all GeForce GTX 680 launched in the first-wave, do. Speaking of first-wave, TechnoReviews managed to screengrab American Retailer Newegg.com listing out nearly all the GeForce GTX 680 models that will be available on launch of the SKU.

The listing confirms the US $499 (before taxes) pricing of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680, because that's how low these cards are available for; they will never price it below NVIDIA-recommended MSRP. Newegg.com applying a $10 margin is quite natural, they've done it with pretty much every major graphics card market-launch this year, including that of the Radeon HD 7900 series. Assuming the GeForce GTX 680 beats Radeon HD 7970, as NVIDIA claims, our educated guess is it still won't start a "price-war" as such. AMD might recalibrate prices of HD 7900 series down 5~10%, but AMD and NVIDIA won't be able to drive prices below a threshold, and that threshold is governed by TSMC, its ability to ship 28 nm chips in volumes big enough, and at prices low enough, to support a price-war between the two GPU giants.

GPU vendors tend to give out their own performance figures of the products they're launching, compared to competitors' products. In one such comparison, allegedly of the GeForce GTX 680, doing rounds on the internet, NVIDIA's new GPU was evaluated by its makers be be over 40% faster than the Radeon HD 7970 in some tests. Keeping Radeon HD 7970 as a baseline, NVIDIA presented its performance figures for the GeForce GTX 680's leads over it, and Radeon HD 7950's trails under it. Results of as many as 15 tests were presented, from 7 games/benchmarks. All benchmarks were run with and without AA. The one test that caught the eye is Battlefield 3 with "4xAA". Experts we spoke to think NVIDIA could be using FXAA algorithm. In any case, NVIDIA looks to be confident of taking back the fastest-GPU crown from AMD.

PowerColor's still-unreleased Radeon HD 7970 Vortex II graphics card has finally taken shape at CeBIT, it was pictured dismantled, and without a GPU in January. We are now learning about the clock speed this card will ship with, 1100 MHz core (compared to 925 MHz AMD reference), and an unknown (but higher than reference) memory clock speed. The Vortex II cooler allows users some control over the air-flow of the two fans on this card's cooling assembly, which could impact cooling performance and noise. The cooler uses a large heatsink to which heat is fed by four 8 mm-thick nickel-plated copper heat pipes.

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of GPU-Z, the popular graphics subsystem information and diagnostic utility. GPU-Z briefs you on the graphics hardware installed in the system, and lets you monitor clock speeds, voltages, temperatures, fan-speeds, and other information in real-time. The new version adds full-support for AMD's Radeon HD 7700 series "Cape Verde" GPUs (HD 7770 and HD 7750) that are bound for launch a little later this month. The new version also has an updated ASIC Quality calculation formula that makes reading on NVIDIA GPUs more reliable.

Other important updates include voltage monitoring support for Radeon HD 7970 and HD 7950; support for some rare GeForce GT 520 variants that are based on GF108, GeForce GTX 555 (OEM), GeForce 305M, and GeForce 610M; and more reliable memory size reading for AMD Radeon graphics cards with large memory sizes. Sensors now refresh in the background by default (and not just when the Sensors tab is in the foreground). The board ID is now displayed along with the BIOS version string.DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.5.9 | TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.5.9 ASUS ROG-Themed

The complete change-log detailing even more updates follows.

AMD (NYSE:AMD) today announced revenue for the fourth quarter of 2011 of $1.69 billion, net loss of $177 million, or $0.24 per share, and operating income of $71 million. The company reported non-GAAP net income of $138 million, or $0.19 per share, and non-GAAP operating income of $172 million. Fourth quarter non-GAAP net income excludes an impairment of AMD's investment in GLOBALFOUNDRIES of $209 million, restructuring charges of $98 million, the loss from discontinued operations of $4 million, the amortization of acquired intangible assets of $3 million and a loss on debt repurchase of $1 million.

For the year ended December 31, 2011, AMD reported revenue of $6.57 billion, net income of $491 million, or $0.66 per share, and operating income of $368 million. Full year non-GAAP net income was $374 million, or $0.50 per share, and non-GAAP operating income was $524 million.

PowerColor is designing a non-reference Radeon HD 7970 graphics card, complete with its own PCB and cooler designs. For the cooler, PowerColor is designing an updated version of its Vortex II cooler featured on some of its older high-end graphics cards based on Radeon HD 6900 series GPUs. The cooler design is your typical aluminum fin-stack heatsink to which heat is fed by four 8 mm thick nickel-plated copper heat pipes. Ventilation is handled by two 80 mm fans, the frames of these fans are threaded and can be twisted to adjust the distance between the fan and the heatsink, adjusting its air-flow.

PowerColor also has a custom-design PCB to go with it, only the prototype pictured has no Tahiti GPU sitting on it, but PowerColor at least has a board design of its own at hand. The PCB draws power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, a CHIL-made controller handles voltage regulation. The VRM consists of a 9+1 phase design with a few other miscellaneous power domains. Those chokes appear to be slightly more cost-effective compared to the CPL-made ones featured on AMD's reference PCB. IR directFETs are replaced by cost-effective yet durable DrMOS chips.

Today Koolance quietly debuted its latest fray into the water cooling solutions industry. Its called the Koolance VID-AR797. The Koolance VID-AR797 is a full coverage video block for water cooling AMD Radeon HD 7970 cards in single and multi video card configurations. It utilizes a high-performance microfin (0.5mm) design made of solid copper with anti-corrosive nickel plating.

Currently the Koolance VID-AR797 is designed for AMD reference layouts only and has an ETA of Jan 16, 2012. No price has yet been given.

If you thought the overclocking and benchmark feats we reported on a few days ago here and here were impressive, wait until you see what four cards can do. Overclocking champion Shamino over at Kingpin Cooling has set four 3DMark and one Unigene benchmark record:

Welcome to the first TechPowerUp news post of 2012! Read on for a couple of impressive overclocking feats with the HD 7970 graphics card.

It looks like the new AMD Radeon HD 7970 could be a bit of a dark horse and a lot more potent than its stock specifications would suggest - excellent for creating a competitive graphics card market. The reviews at stock speeds show the flagship HD 7970 to be around 10-15% faster than NVIDIA's flagship GTX 580, which doesn't seem all that impressive since the GTX 580 has been on the market for over a year now. However, what the reviews haven't really shown, is what kind of an overclocking monster the HD 7970 is. It definitely looks like AMD could have easily beaten the GTX 580 by a much bigger margin than they did, had they wanted to and it makes one wonder why they didn't.

VR-Zone have spent the New Year weekend overclocking this beast, having reached a whopping 1.26 GHz core clock speed with their HD 7970 - and decent benchmark improvements to go with it. Also, with the fan at 100%, the card never got above a very comfortable 68 degrees centigrade while running Furmark, which is amazing considering how this test is specifically designed to heat a graphics card to the max - but please see the update at the bottom of the article. The stock cooler may be noisy, but it's certainly very effective: an excellent result which will prolong the working life of the card.

Welcome to the TechPowerUp 2011 PC technology Christmas special. We hope that you will enjoy reading it while tucking into your turkey, Christmas presents and a little too much wine... In this article, we go through the technology of 2011 that has had the most significance, the most impact and was generally the most talked about. It's not necessarily the best tech of 2011 which is the most significant though, since lemons can be just as significant as the ground-breakers in how they fail to deliver - and the backlash that goes with it.

January: Intel Sandy Bridge i5 & i7

Released on January 9th, the new Intel Core i5 & i7 processors were based on Intel's second generation Core architecture built on a 32 nm production process (HEXUS review). They included an IGP (Integrated Graphics Processor) physically on the same piece of silicon along with HyperThreading. These new dual and quad core processors soundly beat all previous generations of Intel processors in terms of processing performance, heat, power use, features and left AMD in the dust. Therefore, Intel badly needed some competition from AMD and unless you have been living under a rock, you will know how that turned out in October with the launch of Bulldozer. Sandy Bridge was a sound win and is generally considered to be the only architecture worth considering at this point. The i5-2500K is currently at the sweet spot of price/performance. It comes at a stock speed of 3.3 GHz, but typically overclocks to an amazing 4.5 - 5 GHz with a decent air cooler and without too much difficulty in getting there. Models in the budget i3 range were released at various times later. See this Wikipedia article for details.

Even 12 months ago, an Intel Nehalem-powered gaming PC with 6 GB of system memory was considered high-end. Now there's already talk of a graphics card taking shape, that has that much memory. On Thursday this week, AMD launched its Radeon HD 7970 graphics card, which features its newest 28 nm "Tahiti" GPU, and 3 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 384-bit wide memory interface. All along, it had plans of making a dual-GPU graphics card that made use of two of these GPUs to give you a Crossfire-on-a-stick solution. AMD codenamed this product "New Zealand". We are now getting to learn that codename "New Zealand" will carry the intuitive-sounding market name Radeon HD 7990, and that it is headed for a Q1 2012 launch.

This means that Radeon HD 7990 should arrive before April 2012. Tests show that Tahiti has superior energy-efficiency compared to previous-generation "Cayman" GPU, even as it has increased performance. From a technical standpoint, a graphics card featuring two of these Tahiti GPUs, running with specifications matching those of the single-GPU HD 7970, looks workable. Hence, there is talk of 6 GB of total graphics memory (3 GB per GPU system).

Here is the first clear picture of Radeon HD 7970 engineering sample PCB. The final product will feature an all-black PCB color. The picture reveals the PCB to have provision for two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, though on this sample, there are two 6-pin connectors. We've seen other samples using 8 + 6 pin connector arrangements. Unlike earlier thought, the HD 7900 single-GPU reference board very much does use a digital-PWM power design. There appears to be CPL-made single-phase PWM chokes, and Volterra-made regulators. Not all power domains, though, seem to have digital-PWM. We can find a 5+1+1 phase VRM, with some miscellaneous analog power domains.

The GPU package design is nothing like we've seen from AMD. It looks to be slightly larger than that of AMD Cayman. The die is oriented diagonally, with a sturdy brace around it reduce and stabilize the pressure applied by the cooling assembly. There are twelve memory chips around the GPU, as this chip features a 384-bit wide memory interface, to deliver nearly 50% higher memory bandwidth over the previous generation. The card features redundant BIOS, loaded into two separate EEPROM chips that can be toggled using a small 2-way switch located next to the Crossfire connectors. Display connectors include one DVI, one HDMI, and two mini-DP connectors. The second picture below reveals a curvy back-side of the cooling assembly. A nice aesthetic touch with zero function.

Unbeknownst to many, AMD launched the Radeon HD 6930 in some markets. The company apparently doesn't want this launch to disturb reviewers from key high-volume markets, who have their hands full with Radeon HD 7970, and so the HD 6930 got a limited launch. For one, the HD 6930 is most certainly launched in China, and so Expreview gave it a run against the HD 6950 1 GB. The Radeon HD 6930 is carved out of the 40 nm "Cayman" silicon, on which other HD 6900 series products are based. It features 1280 VLIW4 stream processors, 1 GB or 2 GB of GDDR5 memory over a 256-bit wide memory interface, 80 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and clock speeds of 750 MHz (core), 1200 MHz or 4.80 GHz effective (memory). Very few partners made English press-releases about this SKU, HIS was among them. The company launched an IceQ-X graphics card on Monday.Performance summary follows.

Ahead of every major GPU launch, both NVIDIA and AMD give out a document to reviewers known as Reviewer's Guide, in which both provide guidelines (suggestions, not instructions), to reviewers to ensure new GPUs are given a fair testing. In such documents, the two often also give out their own performance expectations from the GPUs they're launching, in which they compare the new GPUs to either previous-generation GPUs from their own brand, or from the competitors'. Apparently such a performance comparison between the upcoming Radeon HD 7970 and NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580, probably part of such a document, got leaked to the internet, which 3DCenter.org re-posted. The first picture below, is a blurry screenshot of a graph in which the two GPUs are compared along a variety of tests, at a resolution of 2560 x 1600. A Tweakers.net community member recreated that graph in Excel, using that data (second picture below).

A couple of things here are worth noting. Reviewer guide performance numbers are almost always exaggerated, so if reviewers get performance results lower than 'normal', they find it abnormal, and re-test. It's an established practice both GPUs vendors follow. Next, AMD Radeon GPUs are traditionally good at 2560 x 1600. For that matter, the performance gap between even the Radeon HD 6970 and GeForce GTX 580 narrows a bit at that resolution.

We've already been through the specifications of HD 7970 "Tahiti" in some detail that matters to those who can draw a performance hunch looking at them. This latest slide shows you the feature-set this GPU comes with. To begin with, there are three main categories of feature updates: Graphics CoreNext, AMD Eyefinity 2.0, and AMD APP Acceleration. AMD claims CoreNext to be a "revolutionary" new architecture that changes the way the GPU crunches numbers.

For the past five generations (since Radeon HD 2000), AMD GPUs have used the VLIW (very-long instruction word) core arrangement. Even the latest VLIW4 introduced by Radeon HD 6900 series, was an evolution, than a revolution of that. CoreNext replaces VLIW stream processors with super-scalar Graphics Compute cores. This should translate to higher performance per mm² die-area, resulting in smaller GPUs, giving AMD room for greater cost-cutting if the competition from NVIDIA for this generation takes effect. The GPU itself is built on TSMC's new 28 nm silicon fabrication process. Next up, AMD confirmed support for PCI-Express 3.0 interface, that nearly doubles system bus bandwidth over the previous generation.

Among the bits and pieces (read: slides) of AMD's press presentation that we're getting, a slide that's definitely missing is performance against competitive or previous generation graphics cards across a range of applications/games. Instead, there's a slide detailing tessellation performance improvements of the Radeon HD 7970 over the previous-generation HD 6970. On average, AMD is looking at about 1.5x (50%) improvements in the tests that it run. One has to also take in to account that the HD 7970 is a faster GPU overall, compared to HD 6970, and of course, that these are AMD's figures.

If slide leaked on Orb-Hardware is to be believed we GPU consumers are in for a pretty big treat in the next month or so. The slide shown below states that the AMD 7970 will have a default core clock speed of 925MHz and a whopping 3 GB of GDDR5 memory.

It also sports a 3.5 TFLOPs precision floating point. Which would put it well beyond the NVIDIA flagship single GPU solution. The slide states the a ROP count of 32, against an earlier speculated count of 48. This could be because AMD may have delinked ROP clusters from memory bus. The cooler itself is under the trademark AMD black shroud so there is no way to see if it uses the rumored "vapor chamber" as seen in after market solutions.

Looking past all the beastly prowess of this slide one cannot help but think about power draw. The "leaked" slide states the 7970 will have a peak power draw of 300 W and an idle draw of 3 W. We will have to wait for review to see if any of these amazing stats are true.