all right so you guys have asked me for this and I'm sorry okay I am going to
make excuses because honestly I did not get a review sample card so I wasn't
able to do that and then I had to go to CES so I wasn't able to do I Was
preparing to go and then I was gone and then now I'm back and now I'm cat
getting caught up so yes I am finally doing my unboxing of the radon hd7 970
though you've probably seen somebody do a video about it already at this point
and yes they were faster than me and yes
that's okay um my ego is not too damaged
by not being the first one to unbox this on the YouTube so here we go today's
card is going to be from powercolor although honestly at the launch that's
not terribly important because most partners are not going to have any kind
of nonreference design cards XFX does
have a card that is using a non-reference cooler however it is still
using the reference PCB and reference components this is the way it works with
all launch cards particularly on the highend for both AMD and NVIDIA so
whatever you're about to look at inside this power color box is short of a
couple accessories maybe a game bundle here or there pretty much exactly what
you would find inside the box of one of powercolor competitors which is to say
that powercolor given that their price is pretty good is proba probably a
fairly good choice for a 7970 all right we have a driver disc
which you shouldn't use you should download the latest we have professional
cooling system oh no these are just this is just ads for like other power color
stuff as well as a quick start guide we have a Dirt 3 code which you don't get
to have because it belongs to whoever ends up with this card uh which might be
me you never
know I'm kind of liking the 7970 at this point in time this is a 28 nmet graphics
card so or I shouldn't say it's a 28 nm
graphics card cuz it's clearly a lot bigger than 28 nm but what it is is it
is using a 28 nanometer GPU so that is
the manufacturing process and I am going to finally
extract these accessories there we go oh thank you for catching that um so what
that means is basically lower power consumption than previous manufacturing
processes so that means that AMD has the
ability to squeeze 4.3 billion
transistors into a space that previously they were not able to because you guys
got to understand there's the overhead of R&D when you're producing chips and
then other than
that the actual cost of the Silicon wafer doesn't vary a whole lot from
process node to process node I mean you can get slightly more expensive materials as you keep going but the
whole idea is that if you can build more transistors in a smaller area the chip
the whole thing actually costs less but if they take the other approach and they
build just more transistors into the same area then it'll cost the same but
it'll be more powerful and that's what we have with the radon 7970 so it
supports up to four displays in ifinity
mode so you've got your DVI your HDMI as well as dual
mini DisplayPort there you go just
going to put those plugs back in hate for hate for something to leak out of
them or something although I don't think that's likely to happen with this particular graphics card um on the back
you can see okay here here here let's just fine we'll just take them all off
there all right what else is cool so 28 nmet GPU all right 384-bit memory bus so
AMD has somehow managed to put all of the graphics memory on the other side of
the PCB which is uh pretty pretty densely packed you can actually see
where they are here and so what that means is huge massive memory bandwidth
so we're still using gddr5 but we are able to write to it and read from it
more quickly so enormous B with also an enormous frame buffer this card has a 3
gbyte frame buffer now we've seen this before GTX 580 had a 3 gig frame buffer
but honestly the GPU wasn't really powerful enough to take advantage of it
anyhow GTX 590 had a 3 gig frame buffer
so did Radeon 69 no 6990 was 4 gig sorry
my bad so 590 had a 3 gig frame buffer but when you're running two gpus in SLI
or Crossfire you're only able to take advantage of half of that frame buffer
so if you were to take two of these three gig cards and run them in crossfire you would have three gigs of
effective memory whereas if you took a GTX 590 and ran it in your system it's
running an SLI by default you actually only have 1.5 gigs which is fine for
single display up to huge resolutions but if you want to go multi-monitor
gaming it's probably not going to be suitable in the latest games running at
very high detail settings another new thing about this graphics card is it
uses PCI Express 3.0 so what is the relevance of that you might ask and the
relevance of that I would answer is um
very little I'm actually wandering around now looking to see if I can find
a gen 3 motherboard ah you know what
don't worry about it okay so there's a couple motherboards on the z68 platform
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
z68 platform that are using uh
PCIe gen 3 compatible slots but right
now it doesn't even work because ivybridge Intel's upcoming C puu which
will have p a PCIe gen 3 controller on board isn't even out yet so we're
basically these motherboards are just saying they're ready for you to drop in a new CPU and a new graphics card to get
gen 3 compatibility so there's that and
there's also the fact that PCI Express 16x like gen one like PCI Express 16x is
still plenty for a single graphics card so what does this mean to you well every
time we go up a generation in PCI Express we are doubling the available
bandwidth so PCI E2 is two times the bandwidth of PCIe 1 and PCIe Gen 3 is
four times the bandwidth of PCIe gen 1
what that means is that a PCIe Gen 2 adx
slot which is what we find on z68 boards is already capable of feeding a high-end
graphics card pretty much no matter high end it no matter how high-end it is so
with PCIe Gen 3 we're going to get the ability to run high-end graphics cards
in our PCIe 4X slots that looks to be about it so we
may actually be able to run like threeway SLI and Crossfire setups on
like you know four four four4 slot layouts and not have any performance
hits so I guess that's cool but um I
mean motherboards already have so many PCIe slots with so much bandwidth I'm
not that concerned about it just right now so there you go PCI E gen 3 so yes
more bandwidth is probably better at some point but right now I don't think
it's going to make that much of a difference it has a sticker on
it the radon H
7970 huh funny okay uh it has
what we've come to expect is a standard AMD blower cooler fan which is great
because it means it's exhausting all of the air out the back of the case so
you're not going to have this thing reheating itself although it runs
surprisingly quiet and cool considering that this is barnone by a significant
margin the fastest single GPU graphics card on the planet so yes it does lose
to the 590 it does lose to the 6990 but
it is faster than a GTX 580 which was the previous King of the cast
and it also overclocks like a beast speaking of overclocking you've got two
BIOS profiles here so you can keep one at factory default you can Flash
alternate bioses to the other one and play around with it and see how far you
can push this card AMD has built in that mod ability to their cards which hold on
let me just put this down which is awesome so I personally
appreciate that very very much I think
we've pretty much wrapped up here I don't think I see anything on my notes
over there that looks IR relevant so thank you for checking out my unboxing
and uh by this time it's probably about your 18th look at the radon H 7970 don't
forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips from unboxings reviews and other
computer videos I'm clearly out of practice because I forgot to show you it
has an 8 pin and a six pin power connector and I also forgot to show you
the included accessories so it does have HDMI to DVI mini DisplayPort two
DisplayPort mini DisplayPort to is
this active oh active DVI cool so it does support dual DVI right out of the
box triple DVI right out of the box wow you have everything you need to run
ifinity right out of the box and then a six pin to 8 Pin power adapter a DVI to
VGA adapter and finally a crossfire connector