So today we're going to be doing a quick unboxing of the all-new Radeon
HD60970. So I'm going to start with a bit of an explanation of a couple
things. First of all, I'm going to explain the numbering scheme on this
card. So AMD used to have a numbering
scheme that went okay uh 5970 was their highestend dual GPU card
and then 5870 was their fastest single
GPU card and then 5850 was the the next
one down and then 5770 was a different class of GPU. That used to be how it
worked. Now with the 6000 series they've actually changed it. So the 6870 is not
the replacement for the 5870. I've seen some confusion in the comments under my
videos about this concept. The 6870 is
actually the replacement for the 5770 and the
6970 is the price point replacement for the
5870. And then there will actually be another card coming later that will be a
dual GPU solution because that's AMD's whole strategy is build a scalable GPU
at a reasonable size with reasonable power so that you can slap two of them
together. Cool stuff. All right, so the 6T970, first thing we're going to
notice, it has 2 gigs of DDDR5. So, what that means is you have double the frame
buffer, bigger textures, all that good stuff. In terms of performance, it's
hard to say how much of a performance difference there is right now, but I've
got a feeling we might be able to compare it to a 1 gig version further on
down the line. Now, the only 2 gig
version we had of the 5870 was actually the Iffinity 6 edition, as well as a
couple custom cards. And uh it did make a small impact on that particular card,
but this one's faster, so we might see more of a difference. It's a Gigabyte
card, so it comes with a 3-year warranty in the US and Canada. And here we have a
convenient list of all of the features that you need to know about. Full
DirectX11, AMD Infinity multi-dis technology, hence the multi-dis behind
me. Uh supports up to four monitors, although I don't know that that's
necessarily the recommended configuration. Uh supports PCI Express
2.1, 1080p full HD. Duh. supports this,
never mind 1080p AMD HD 3D technology,
including HDMI 1.4A for 3D Blu-ray and
7.1 HD surround sound over HDMI as well
as DisplayPort 1.2. Okay, let's see if there's anything
else relevant on the back. Oh, yeah, tessellation. So, the 6000 series is all
about tessellation performance. That's one of the ways that these new graphics
cards are going to significantly improve performance, and I mean destroy over the
5000 series cards. One of the other things that AMD has really beefed up is
the anti-aliasing capability of this particular graphics card. We've got a
couple new modes that are going to basically without um a huge impact on
performance allow you to either have higher quality anti-aliasing or cheaper
that is less performance impact anti-aliasing. Here's a driver CD. Throw
it away. Here is a manual. Read through it and then keep it or throw it away. I
guess it doesn't really matter to me. Next, we have adapters. So, uh based on
the fact that we have a dual Molex to six pin and a dual Molex to 8 pin. By
the way, this is a lot smarter than most of the eight pin adapters I see, which
are dual six pin to 8 pin, which is ridiculous. Dual Molex to 8 pin. That
makes sense. Good job, Gigabyte. That is a good thing to include. We have a
Crossfire bridge, standard length for standard
spacing motherboards. Any of the non-standard ones should come with their
own Crossfire bridge anyway. And then we have the card itself. It's quite heavy
actually. It's a lot of lot of weight to it for a uh single GPU AMD card. So,
let's go ahead and get this baby opened
up. Got our anti-static baggie with a piece of tape
here. And we will see the 6970 in all
its glory. That is a beastly looking
card. I really like Gigabytes graphics on here. I know that in a lot of cases
you can't really see the the VGA sticker, but I'm going to go ahead and
say, "Yeah, I I really like it anyway because it matters to me cuz I'm shallow
like that." All right. So, in terms of the overall look of the card, it's very
similar to the 6870. We've got that same distinctive black and white, black and
white, red and black stripe thing going on on the top of the card. We have a
ventilation hole here. So, something to be aware of. And I did see some comments
about this in that build I did in the Fractal Design Define R3 with two
high-end GPUs is that if you have an exhaust here and you have a side fan
kind of over it, you want to make sure that's going out rather than like
pushing against the natural air flow direction of the card. So that was why I
had done it that way. And we've also got two Crossfire bridges for support uh
with support for either up to three-way Crossfire X. Okay. Here for here, let's
look at the power as well. Uh here we've got, as I mentioned before, one six pin,
one 8 pin power connector. So this is quite a beefy card. And there seems to
be some kind of a DIP switch here. That's interesting. I know that um it
can be used for flashing the BIOS, but I don't know what else it's good
for. Well, we'll figure that out later. Okay, moving around to the back of the
card, we've got the same basic look here. So, it's going to look quite sharp
no matter what case you install it in. And then down at the bottom of the card,
we find nothing of note other than a PCI Express connector. Now, I love this
shroud on the back of the card is like the best idea ever because I don't want
to see, you know, what green or red or
blue PCB you're using. You know what?
Just a nice black shrouded heat sink.
It's functional. Looks great. I approve of this message. And uh oh, you can see
that there's actually two-part construction to the shroud that goes on the front. So, there's the plastic part
and then this part appears to actually be made of plastic. Can't
tell. Metal. I'm pretty sure it's metal cuz I think that's part of the uh of the
heat sink. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The bottom part is metal. So, that's part of the heat sink that actually
cools the VRM, RAM chips, all that other good stuff. All right. Let's move around
to the business end of the card where we will find all of our connectivity
options. Now, bear in mind, you can't use all of these at the same time. So,
if you want to run three displays, that means you can run any two of the DVI or
HDMI and then at least one DisplayPort. If you want to run four displays, any
two of these, and two DisplayPort, so be aware of that. Multi- display, you
will probably need to use DisplayPort at some point. We've got a half open uh
PCI slot for ventilation. So, that explains why they needed the extra
ventilation room uh here on the top of
the card so that you can exhaust. So, basically, this is kind of I'd consider
this a half and half between external exhaust and internal exhaust. So,
um yeah, there's not really much else to say about that. Now, oh, this is
interesting. Look at that. This card does not include a DVI to VGA adapter.
So, as per my recommendation that if you're buying a high-end card, you
should probably throw that VGA monitor away, uh, Gigabyte seems to have taken
that to heart, and they don't think you need a VGA adapter for this particular card. Although, I can tell you right
now, it will work if you use an adapter from DVI to VGA. So, thank you for
checking out my unboxing of the Radeon HD6970. And I'm just going to turn off
the camera for a sec, find out what this dip switch is for, and then I'll be back. So, it's something to do with
flashing the BIOS. That's uh pretty much all the details I have right now. Don't
forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other
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