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all right so you guys have asked me for this and I'm sorry okay I am going to

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make excuses because honestly I did not get a review sample card so I wasn't

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able to do that and then I had to go to CES so I wasn't able to do I Was

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preparing to go and then I was gone and then now I'm back and now I'm cat

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getting caught up so yes I am finally doing my unboxing of the radon hd7 970

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though you've probably seen somebody do a video about it already at this point

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and yes they were faster than me and yes

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that's okay um my ego is not too damaged

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by not being the first one to unbox this on the YouTube so here we go today's

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card is going to be from powercolor although honestly at the launch that's

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not terribly important because most partners are not going to have any kind

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of nonreference design cards XFX does

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have a card that is using a non-reference cooler however it is still

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using the reference PCB and reference components this is the way it works with

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all launch cards particularly on the highend for both AMD and NVIDIA so

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whatever you're about to look at inside this power color box is short of a

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couple accessories maybe a game bundle here or there pretty much exactly what

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you would find inside the box of one of powercolor competitors which is to say

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that powercolor given that their price is pretty good is proba probably a

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fairly good choice for a 7970 all right we have a driver disc

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which you shouldn't use you should download the latest we have professional

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cooling system oh no these are just this is just ads for like other power color

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stuff as well as a quick start guide we have a Dirt 3 code which you don't get

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to have because it belongs to whoever ends up with this card uh which might be

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me you never

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know I'm kind of liking the 7970 at this point in time this is a 28 nmet graphics

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card so or I shouldn't say it's a 28 nm

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graphics card cuz it's clearly a lot bigger than 28 nm but what it is is it

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is using a 28 nanometer GPU so that is

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the manufacturing process and I am going to finally

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extract these accessories there we go oh thank you for catching that um so what

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that means is basically lower power consumption than previous manufacturing

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processes so that means that AMD has the

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ability to squeeze 4.3 billion

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transistors into a space that previously they were not able to because you guys

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got to understand there's the overhead of R&D when you're producing chips and

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then other than

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that the actual cost of the Silicon wafer doesn't vary a whole lot from

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process node to process node I mean you can get slightly more expensive materials as you keep going but the

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whole idea is that if you can build more transistors in a smaller area the chip

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the whole thing actually costs less but if they take the other approach and they

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build just more transistors into the same area then it'll cost the same but

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it'll be more powerful and that's what we have with the radon 7970 so it

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supports up to four displays in ifinity

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mode so you've got your DVI your HDMI as well as dual

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mini DisplayPort there you go just

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going to put those plugs back in hate for hate for something to leak out of

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them or something although I don't think that's likely to happen with this particular graphics card um on the back

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you can see okay here here here let's just fine we'll just take them all off

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there all right what else is cool so 28 nmet GPU all right 384-bit memory bus so

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AMD has somehow managed to put all of the graphics memory on the other side of

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the PCB which is uh pretty pretty densely packed you can actually see

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where they are here and so what that means is huge massive memory bandwidth

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so we're still using gddr5 but we are able to write to it and read from it

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more quickly so enormous B with also an enormous frame buffer this card has a 3

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gbyte frame buffer now we've seen this before GTX 580 had a 3 gig frame buffer

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but honestly the GPU wasn't really powerful enough to take advantage of it

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anyhow GTX 590 had a 3 gig frame buffer

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so did Radeon 69 no 6990 was 4 gig sorry

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my bad so 590 had a 3 gig frame buffer but when you're running two gpus in SLI

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or Crossfire you're only able to take advantage of half of that frame buffer

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so if you were to take two of these three gig cards and run them in crossfire you would have three gigs of

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effective memory whereas if you took a GTX 590 and ran it in your system it's

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running an SLI by default you actually only have 1.5 gigs which is fine for

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single display up to huge resolutions but if you want to go multi-monitor

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gaming it's probably not going to be suitable in the latest games running at

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very high detail settings another new thing about this graphics card is it

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uses PCI Express 3.0 so what is the relevance of that you might ask and the

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relevance of that I would answer is um

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very little I'm actually wandering around now looking to see if I can find

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a gen 3 motherboard ah you know what

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don't worry about it okay so there's a couple motherboards on the z68 platform

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I'm going to walk around this way let's let's go look at the card I guess for now there's a couple motherboards on the

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z68 platform that are using uh

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PCIe gen 3 compatible slots but right

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now it doesn't even work because ivybridge Intel's upcoming C puu which

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will have p a PCIe gen 3 controller on board isn't even out yet so we're

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basically these motherboards are just saying they're ready for you to drop in a new CPU and a new graphics card to get

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gen 3 compatibility so there's that and

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there's also the fact that PCI Express 16x like gen one like PCI Express 16x is

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still plenty for a single graphics card so what does this mean to you well every

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time we go up a generation in PCI Express we are doubling the available

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bandwidth so PCI E2 is two times the bandwidth of PCIe 1 and PCIe Gen 3 is

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four times the bandwidth of PCIe gen 1

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what that means is that a PCIe Gen 2 adx

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slot which is what we find on z68 boards is already capable of feeding a high-end

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graphics card pretty much no matter high end it no matter how high-end it is so

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with PCIe Gen 3 we're going to get the ability to run high-end graphics cards

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in our PCIe 4X slots that looks to be about it so we

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may actually be able to run like threeway SLI and Crossfire setups on

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like you know four four four4 slot layouts and not have any performance

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hits so I guess that's cool but um I

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mean motherboards already have so many PCIe slots with so much bandwidth I'm

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not that concerned about it just right now so there you go PCI E gen 3 so yes

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more bandwidth is probably better at some point but right now I don't think

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it's going to make that much of a difference it has a sticker on

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it the radon H

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7970 huh funny okay uh it has

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what we've come to expect is a standard AMD blower cooler fan which is great

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because it means it's exhausting all of the air out the back of the case so

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you're not going to have this thing reheating itself although it runs

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surprisingly quiet and cool considering that this is barnone by a significant

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margin the fastest single GPU graphics card on the planet so yes it does lose

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to the 590 it does lose to the 6990 but

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it is faster than a GTX 580 which was the previous King of the cast

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and it also overclocks like a beast speaking of overclocking you've got two

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BIOS profiles here so you can keep one at factory default you can Flash

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alternate bioses to the other one and play around with it and see how far you

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can push this card AMD has built in that mod ability to their cards which hold on

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let me just put this down which is awesome so I personally

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appreciate that very very much I think

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we've pretty much wrapped up here I don't think I see anything on my notes

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over there that looks IR relevant so thank you for checking out my unboxing

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and uh by this time it's probably about your 18th look at the radon H 7970 don't

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forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips from unboxings reviews and other

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computer videos I'm clearly out of practice because I forgot to show you it

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has an 8 pin and a six pin power connector and I also forgot to show you

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the included accessories so it does have HDMI to DVI mini DisplayPort two

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DisplayPort mini DisplayPort to is

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this active oh active DVI cool so it does support dual DVI right out of the

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box triple DVI right out of the box wow you have everything you need to run

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ifinity right out of the box and then a six pin to 8 Pin power adapter a DVI to

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VGA adapter and finally a crossfire connector