welcome to a very random
unboxing we are in the one and only
slicks room that he
RS and apparently he's
seven do you like his car's light switch
cover uh no seriously though we are he
claims he's taking it down this weekend but I don't believe it for a second cuz
I know he loves
it composure welcome to my unboxing of the
Radeon hd7970 dual x OC from Sapphire this is
an overclocked card that is based on the 7970 GPU which means you got 3 gigs of
gddr5 memory at ludicrous clock speeds
you got a 28 nm GPU supporting all of the latest Technologies you've got dual
BIOS which means that you can set different overclocking profiles within
different bioses and it also means that if a flash fails for whatever reason you
can recover it relatively easily compared to Prior cards the fact that
it's got the dual x cooler means that you've got significantly better cooling
than the stock fan and I'm going to be covering that in an upcoming video where
I compare the dual x cooler especially in an overclocked scenario I against the
reference cooler and uh okay cooler and
quieter overclock ready PCI Express uh
3.0 is you know what why don't we talk more about the technology once we get
the card open cuz I'm sure that's what you guys want to see not like you know
this and you know that kind of thing you
guys are interested in the graphics card cuz I know what you guys are all about
all right so here we go we find the
video card inside I'm just going to put that away and force you guys to uh learn
about the accessories before you get to see the graphics card itself I haven't
actually seen one of these yet so I'm kind of excited to check it out we've
got an HDMI to DVI adapter so that means the card will support dual DVI out of
the box no problems we've also got a mini DisplayPort to DVI adapter which
means you've got all the adapters you need is this uh active or passive that's
an active adapter so you got everything you need to
run um ifinity out of the box you've got
a four pin Molex to six pin PCIe adapter
and then a oh a dual Molex to a pin PCIe
adapter these are rare I'm going to hold on to
that all right what else we got here mini DisplayPort to sideways big
DisplayPort good thinking Sapphire and I'll show you why that's important
actually I'm going to set that aside Crossfire Bridge DVI to VGA adapter and
finally an HDMI cable so that is I think
they even say how long it is on the front includes HDMI cable aha that is a
1.8 m HDMI cable so that's about 6 ft
driver installation CD don't worry about that download the latest off the AMD
website okay registration card cool and
finally a quick start guide showing you how to quickly
start it's a guide all
right um so let's go ahead and throw that back in there you know what let's
just let's just get all of this out of the way completely okay so this is the 7970 you
know what I just realized it doesn't
actually say anywhere that this is an overclocked card so I guess we'll find
out if it's an overclocked card I know that it's very easy to turn it into an
overclocked card actually just a sec sorry guys so yeah it's very easy to
turn it into an overclocked card
using back to the front of the Box the sapphire tricks tweak and overclock
utility for Sapphire graphics card so you can use that to turn up the clock
speed of the card and 797s are already
renowned for being phenomenal overclockers so I my expectation is
you'd be able to achieve a fairly significant overclock with this card so
this uses as you can see a completely
non-reference cooler so this is their dual x cooler this has dual 92 mm fans
five heat pipes including two fat you
know pH JT two fat heat pipes and the reason that they're using the two
thicker ones is because these ones have further to carry away the heat so they
need to be a little bit more efficient than the ones that are located directly
over the GPU core itself you can actually see where the GPU is right down
there can you see that cool um just SEC
no never mind um and those ones are going much
closer to where they're going to be cooled directly by the fan so you can see we got two going off this way and
one going off this way positioning them right under the fan also these fans Not
only cool the GPU itself but also the
components on the PCB so that means your memory which is covered by heat spreader
so I'm going to show you the sort of the heat spreader is up here and over here
and kind of there yep and it's you can see it here you can also see it down
here you see that heat sink right there that's uh that's covering the vrm here
these ones you can see are covering any of the memory chips any other misscellaneous chips that need cooling
so they're going to be directly cooled by these fans as well
so finally let's see what else we got here as far as cooling goes that's oh
yeah sorry okay so I always like to cover this compared to the reference
cooler which is a blower design which exhausts all of the air out the back of
the case these perform significantly better I mean we're talking up to 15 20°
underload better than a reference cooler they're also quieter due to the dual fan
design and the like fat ludicrous heat pipes that are going on however the
drawback is that if you don't have a case with adequate ventilation these can
be a bit of a problem for for the temperatures of the other components in your system so make sure you got a
decent case and then you have nothing to worry about okay moving on uh what do we
got here dual x this actually a pretty slick looking card Slicker looking than
Slick's room but not going to stop harping on that uh
so power requirements we've got a six pin and an 8 Pin power connector at the
back of the card in their usual locations on the back of the card we see
we got a black PCB which in my personal opinion is more attractive than pretty
much any other approach to that uh we've got dual Crossfire connectors so you can
configure these in any number of manners in crossfire there's our switches for
BIOS 1 and two there's your little switch so you can switch between
different BIOS profiles that you load onto the card next we've got our PCI
Express 3.0 16x slot providing up to double the bandwidth versus PCI Express
2.0 however that does not turn into a doubling in performance so that's you
know I mean you might see a couple percentage here and there where you are
bandwidth limited but usually that's not the bottleneck where this is even more
of an advantage is on platforms like z68 or the upcoming z77 where your SLI or
your Crossfire slots are going to be running in 8X 8X mode now PCIe 3.0 8X
has the same bandwidth as the last generation PCI Express 2.0 16x so that's
where you really see uh that play out
well for you okay so in terms of infinity you're going to want to use one
DVI and two mini display ports because um if you're running a 120 HZ 1080p
panel or anything above 1080 or 1920 x 1200 HDMI won't be enough to drive it
however if you are running triple 1080ps then you can go DVI HDMI and one mini
DisplayPort although the car does support up to four outputs using all
four of these connectors bearing in mind though that if you want to use DVI and
HDMI you have to use an active adapter for the DisplayPort SPS let me just see
if there's anything I've missed here so Crossfire X is AMD ifinity 2.0 so that's
the next generation of ifinity including support for stereo
3D we covered 3 gigs of memory 3 gigs of memory is a big Advantage versus the
competition so the gtx680 does outperform the 7970 at stock clocks
however once you start overclocking especially if you're not comfortable
overvolting as you guys may or may not have seen in my GTX 680 review the
performance Gap Narrows significantly and the 7970 starts to look like a
better performer then there's the fact that it also has 3 gigs of memory on
board what that means is if you're running a triple monitor setup you have
to load those textures into the memory of your card regardless because yeah
Slick's not running a triple monitor setup uh we're laughing at his monitors
they're awesome um right you have to load all of those
textures into the graphics memory um even if you have multiple cards it all
has to go into each graphics card so the higher higher the resolution you're
running at the more you need that memory especially for modern games and upcoming
games so that's a big Advantage I think for the 7970 for multim monitor Gamers
and I think that pretty much covers it it also supports 4K displays as well as
HDMI with 3D and thank you for checking out my
unboxing of the sapphire hd7970
dual x graphics card I look forward to doing a little bit of an overclocking
comparison as as well as Cooling and Acoustics comparison versus the
reference 7970 and I can tell you guys now my expectation is it's going to
absolutely blow it away don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings reviews and
other computer videos sorry guys I promised to talk
about why this was so important and then I totally forgot so this is important
because once the card is installed in your system and you go like this if you
had two adapters that went this way or even one adapter that went this way
you'd be blocking other ports with the cable that plugs into it it and with the
wideness of it so that's why this is way smarter than other implementations that
I've seen of these kinds of adapters in the past