TUL Corporation, a leading manufacturer of AMD graphic cards, today announces a breathtaking graphics solution: the PowerColor HD7970. Based on the 28nm GCN architecture, HD7970 enables the absurdly high frame rates at demanding setting while using less power and better transistor efficiency, maximizes the most astonishing gaming performance like never before.

Clocks at 925MHz core and 1375MHz memory speed, the PowerColor HD7970 can easily boost up your PC with the support of the latest PCI Express 3.0; through doubling the bandwidth per lane of previous generation, it can release the power of GPU to maximize performance while paired with the latest platform.

Hightech Information System (HIS) today announced the launch of HIS 7970 3GB. The card is the world's first 28nm GPU graphics card, pushing the graphics experiences to an unrivalled level! With a clock rate of 925 MHz, memory clock of 5.5 Gbps as well as a 384-bit memory interface, this new 7000 series HIS 7970 3GB offers maximum and crazy performances!

HIS 7970 3GB comes in a great value with the bundled the Eyefinity Dongle - the Active Mini DisplayPort to SL-DVI Dongle. In addition, the bundled HIS Weight Lifter makes the card last longer. It takes some weight off of the card and the PCIe slot, providing a simple but effective solution to prevent potential damage to the card due to the card's weight.

Over the past few days, we were hearing rumors from many quarters that AMD's "Tahiti" high-performance GPU may have been a deviation from an older specification, and that it really has 2304 stream processors spread across 40 GCN compute units (CUs), instead of the 32 the Radeon HD 7970 ended up with. Both AMD and NVIDIA create more redundant components on their chips than their SKUs end up getting, so they could increase yields, it's a process commonly known as "harvesting".

On Tuesday, AMD quashed the rumor in an e-mail to Bright Side of News, in which it said that Tahiti XT (Radeon HD 7970) makes use of all the CUs there are, on the chip. The 40 CU / 2308 SP rumor gained some weight with the fact that since AMD is venturing into unknown territory (TSMC's 28 nm process, built after quite some delays and failures), it could do some heavy harvesting. Examples of harvesting in recent past include Intel Sandy Bridge-E Core i7 processors, which use only up to 6 out of 8 cores on the silicon, and only up to 15 MB out of 20 MB available on it; and GeForce GTX 480, which used only 480 out of 512 CUDA cores available on the GF100 GPU.

On the 22nd of December 2011, AMD launched its Radeon HD 7970, announcing that the cards will be available in the retail channels by 9th January, 2012. It permitted reviewers with access to AMD-made samples to post reviews on the 22nd, and told the press that it will have a FOB (freight-onboard) price (the price at which each card ships out of its place of origin, in this case Hong Kong, China) of US $525. Market sources told DonanimHaber that this price has been adjusted from $525 to $475. That doesn't necessarily mean that retail HD 7970 will cost lower than the $550 target retail price AMD talked about in several occasions. It will be up to downstream distributors and retailers on whether they want to convey this latest cut to the end-user, or keep a bigger "cut" (margin) for themselves. AMD hasn't officially announced any price updates so far.

The soon-to-be-released Radeon HD 7970 is certainly getting its share of waterblocks but there are also air-based custom coolers coming for AMD's flagship card. One of them is Arctic's Accelero Xtreme 7970 which measures 288 (L) x 104 (W) x 54 (H) mm, weights 653 grams, and features 84 aluminum fins, five 6 mm copper heatpipes, a copper base, and three 92 mm PWM fans that work at 900 to 2000 RPM.

Arctic's cooler comes with pre-applied MX-4 thermal compound, is CrossFireX compatible, and is backed by a six-year warranty. The Accelero Xtreme 7970 costs $97.95 / €73.83 and is set to become available on January 31st.

On the 22nd of December, 2011, AMD paper-launched its Radeon HD 7970. By all measures, it appears like when the card hits retail availability on the 9th of this month, AMD will have a winning product at hand, for the price-segment it's targeting with that. According to latest reports, a leaked confidential email of AMD sourced by Guru3D (now redacted) says that AMD wants to launch Radeon HD 7950 on the same day of its retail availability, which happens to be in the first week of February, 2012. So no Radeon HD 7950 on the 9th of January, as we were earlier told about. The Radeon HD 7950 will be an important SKU for AMD, as it's more affordable than the $550 HD 7970.

So you thought the 1.26 GHz core - 6.30 GHz memory feat was quite something, considering that Sapphire already has a card in the works that does 1.33 GHz core 5.73 GHz memory out of the box? Wait till you see the numbers an overclocker for the MyDrivers community achieved. With the right voltage assistance, coupled with the right kind of cooling (liquid nitrogen), the overclocker achieved a Radeon HD 7970 overclocked speed as high as 1700 MHz core, and 2000 MHz (actual) or 8.00 GHz effective GDDR5 memory speed, churning out memory bandwidth of exactly 384 GB/s. The best part is that this wasn't a hit-and-run feat, the setup was able to run 3DMark 11 and 3DMark Vantage. The scores are pictured below. Details of the volt-mod can be found at the source.

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.

Another European company, EK Water Blocks (EKWB), is ready with its full-coverage water block for AMD's Radeon HD 7970 graphics card, the EK-FC7970. Unlike Aqua Computer's AquagrATIx 7900, the EK-FC7970 isn't launched, the company isn't taking orders yet, but it posted a teaser picture on its Facebook page. The picture reveals the block to use copper as its primary material, with an acetal top. It appears to have standard G1/4" threading. As a full-coverage block, it covers all the heat-producing components on the obverse side of the card's PCB, including the GPU, the twelve memory chips, and VRM. EKWB did not give out other specifications, price, or availability.

Here is the first picture of a non-reference design Radeon HD 7970 graphics card. Made by Gigabyte, the GV-R797OC-3GD is a factory-overclocked graphics card, which makes use of a custom Ultra Durable VGA+ PCB by the company, and a custom-design triple-fan WindForce cooler. Its Ultra Durable VGA+ PCB makes use of 2 oz copper layer for better electrical stability and heat distribution, ferrite-core chokes, low RDS (on) MOSFETs, hand-picked high-performance GDDR5 memory chips, etc.

The cooler makes use of a combination of heatsinks and aluminum fin arrays to which heat from the GPU, memory, and VRM is fed by copper heat-pipes, and ventilated by three fans. Gigabyte also has a reference-design graphics card, which uses a reference-design cooling assembly, and most likely also a reference design PCB, except that it's colored red. It's not likely that red color PCB will be standard among AIB-branded retail cards, because the HIS and MSI cards pictured by OCUK recently, were found to have black-colored ones. There's no word of the pricing or clock speeds.

It looks like AMD's claims of HD 7970's extreme overclocking capabilities weren't the usual PR hoopla. A confidential company document revealing the non-reference models Sapphire has in the works, got leaked to the web, and it is a bundle of surprises. To begin with, Sapphire plans no less than six non-reference Radeon HD 7970 models apart from the vanilla AMD reference design card. Among these, the top-of-the-line cards are codenamed "Atomic RX" and "Atomic WC". One can guess that the "RX" is an air-cooled card, and the "WC" a water-cooled one. It packs blistering clock speeds of 1335 MHz core, with 5735 MHz (1433 MHz actual) memory.

The other card that caught our eyes is codenamed "FLEX 6G". The Flex variant typically features a flexible display output configuration. This card is said to have six mini-DP connectors. While this card sticks to AMD reference clock speeds, it packs a whopping 6144 MB of video memory, all wired to a single GPU. While 4 Gbit GDDR5 chips don't exist, we expect Sapphire to be using 24 * 2 Gbit chips on this card, with twelve sets of two chips sharing 32 bit paths. Then there are other milder factory overclocked cards apart from the Atomic; there's Toxic 3G, and VaporX 3G, both packing impressive out of the box clock speeds.

Until now, any site that has reviewed the Radeon HD 7970 has done so, using the sample AMD provided. There are very few CrossFire reviews out there, because it's simply too hard to get more than one AMD sample. 3-way and 4-way CrossFire reviews could be even rare, if such reviews even exist to begin with. This will change on the 9th of January, when AMD's add-in board partners are officially allowed to launch their Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards, when retailers can start selling these cards, and for reviewers to end up with enough cards to do CrossFire reviews.

Apparently British retailer Overclockers.uk got its stock of Radeon HD 7970 from at least two manufacturers, MSI and HIS. The site proudly showed off stacks of HIS and MSI Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards (first picture below). We certainly hope those are not all the cards it has in its inventory. OCUK did get a chance to pull three cards out of those boxes, and set up a 3-way CrossFireX setup using an Intel Core i7 "Sandy Bridge-E" system. At least one of those three cards is an MSI card, which isn't much different from the reference card than the MSI badge on the fan. Since the system is PCI-Express Gen 3.0 compliant, we can expect there to be close to no interface bottlenecks. And the guy who set that system up for a few snaps did what every enthusiast would do - run some benchmarks.

Aqua Computer is the first in the industry with a water block designed for AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics card. Called the AquagrATIx 7900, the block provides full-coverage for the obverse side of the AMD Radeon HD 7970 PCB, which is where all the heat-producing components are. Its primary material is copper, with a stainless steel top. Its channel bears a nearly symmetric shape, the portion over the GPU is ridged to increase sub-surface area for improved heat dissipation to the coolant. While the AquagrATIx 7900 doesn't include fittings, it features two standard G1/4" threads (the inlet and outlet). The block is also said to be compatible with Radeon HD 7950. Aqua Computer is accepting orders for this, with estimated delivery time of 21 days. It is priced at €89.90.

Last Thursday, AMD launched the Radeon HD 7970 graphics card based on its new 28 nm "Tahiti" silicon, but it remained tight-lipped about the specifications of the more important SKU that will be based on it, the Radeon HD 7950. The HD 7970 will carry a launch price of US $550, making the HD 7950 an SKU to watch out for. According to details released by XTReview, the "Tahiti Pro" or HD 7950 will be carved out this way:

• 1792 stream processors, 28 GCN compute units
• 112 TMUs, 32 ROPs (derived)
• 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface
• 3 GB memory, memory clock around 5.00 GHz

The core clock speed, the exact memory clock speed, and more importantly, the target price-point, remain unknown. The Radeon HD 7950 is expected to be launched on the 9th of January.

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).

Although AMD's Radeon add-in board partners (AIBs) are still "under oath" (read: NDA) not to disclose their products before the 9th of January, Club3D's Radeon HD 7970 press-shots still made it to the web. Pictured below are the Club3D Radeon HD 7970 graphics card and its box-art. The box art is typical Club3D, nothing exceptionally new there. The card, too, sticks to AMD's reference board design, till the point where it uses a red-colored PCB instead of a black one (found on AMD's HD 7970 press samples).

Based on the 28 nm "Tahiti" silicon, Radeon HD 7970 is the first DirectX 11.1 compliant graphics card, it packs 2048 GCN cores, and 3 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 384-bit wide memory interface. The core is clocked at 925 MHz, and the memory at 1375 MHz (5.50 GHz). It is expected that this card will stick to the price AMD disclosed, around US $550.

Over the last few months, motherboard manufacturers have been raising a big hoopla over how it's important to pick their products that feature PCI Express 3.0 (Gen 3.0) slots. There was even some drama between competing motherboard manufacturers over who was first to the market with this technology, even when consumers couldn't really make use of the technology. To begin with, you needed a next-generation Ivy Bridge CPU, then you needed a compliant graphics card. Sandy Bridge-E, fortunately, formally introduced the technology, complete with motherboards and processors that support it.

GPU maker AMD wanted to be the first to be out there with a GPU that's compliant with this interface, and so one thing led to another, and VR-Zone got to set up a test-bed using Core i7 "Sandy Bridge-E", ASUS Rampage IV Extreme (which allows users to change PCI-Express standard mode in the BIOS setup program, by forcing Gen 2 or Gen 1 mode), and an HD 7970, to see if running the GPU on PCIe 2.0 and PCIe 3.0 modes made any worthwhile difference. The results are in: zero, nada, zilch, sunna (zero in my language).

AMD Introduces the Radeon HD 7970 Graphics Card, The 28 nm Era Begins

Bring ye a fresh set of bragging rights because today AMD has (paper) launched the first graphics card powered by a 28 nm GPU, the Radeon HD 7970. Equipped with one Tahiti chip, this new, high-end offering is the first to make use of the GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture which is claimed to deliver an improvement 'of over 150% in performance/sq mm over the prior generation.'

The Radeon HD 7970 also adopts the PCI Express 3.0 standard (which ensures a large, healthy bandwidth), and implements the PowerTune and AMD ZeroCore Power technologies that allow for 'higher performance levels while maximizing power efficiencies'.

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.

TechPowerUp today released GPU-Z version 0.5.7, the latest version of our popular graphics system information and diagnostic utility. This release of GPU-Z comes just in time for the launch of AMD's Radeon HD 7000 series. It packs tested support for Radeon HD 7970 and HD 7350. It packs an updated PCI Express 3.0 detection routine, with better detection reliability. It fixes a bug related to "APIC counter broken" on AMD Fusion APU platforms. Detection is improved for some rare GPUs, such as HD 6450A, HD 6470M, and the more popular HD 5570.

Several reliability updates were introduced. This includes fixed (improved) fillrate calculation on Fermi architecture, fixed ROP count on GT 420, GT 520, HD 5450, HD 6450; fixed random values showing as default clocks on some NVIDIA cards; fixed random value showing as shader clock on NVIDIA cards without shader clock; and addition of process size, die size, transistor count for Radeon E6760.DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.5.7 and TechPowerUp GPU-Z 0.5.7 ROG-Themed

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.

Dutch online retailer Comcom.nl couldn't hold its rocks, and listed the upcoming Radeon HD 7970 on its site. Listed, was an ASUS-branded card (with no pictures, of course), so it could be a paper listing for pre-orders. Comcom is asking €482.11 for this card before applicable taxes, about €573.71 with them. Disturbing as the pricing looks, it endorses speculated North American pricing of US $550 (pre-tax) for these cards. In its listing the retailer mentions the card's model number as HD7970-3GD5, and as having 3 DVI connectors, 1 HDMI, and two mini-DP.

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.

AMD Radeon HD 7970 launch is just around the corner. Ahead of its launch, AMD conducted its usual press briefing. DonanimHaber has access to some of the slides shown in that meeting. Earlier this day, we brought you perhaps the most important of them all, specifications. Let's take a look at the reference board design itself. AMD is sticking to the black+red colour scheme, and has come up with a swanky new cooling assembly design. The design, unlike those of higher-end Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards, is surprisingly curvy and features dashes of red plastic making up its contours, surrounded by tougher black ABS.

A welcome change here from the previous generations, is that the card is truly single-slot capable, when say, a single-slot full-coverage water block is used. High-end cards from previous generation HD 5000 and HD 6000 have a dual DVI connector cluster that extends into two expansion slots, which many enthusiasts found to be annoying, especially when setting up benches with four single-GPU graphics cards in scenarios where PCI-Express slot spacing isn't kind. Moving on to display connectivity, the card has one DVI, one HDMI, and two mini-DisplayPort connectors, all arranged in the confines of a single expansion slot. The space of the second slot is dedicated to a hot-air exhaust of the cooling assembly. All board partners are required to ship HDMI-to-DVI dongles, and active mini-DP dongles.