Sapphire HD 7970 OC 3GB Video Card With Twin-X Cooler Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,889 words · ~9 min read
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welcome to a very random
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unboxing we are in the one and only
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slicks room that he
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RS and apparently he's
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seven do you like his car's light switch
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cover uh no seriously though we are he
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claims he's taking it down this weekend but I don't believe it for a second cuz
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I know he loves
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it composure welcome to my unboxing of the
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Radeon hd7970 dual x OC from Sapphire this is
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an overclocked card that is based on the 7970 GPU which means you got 3 gigs of
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gddr5 memory at ludicrous clock speeds
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you got a 28 nm GPU supporting all of the latest Technologies you've got dual
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BIOS which means that you can set different overclocking profiles within
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different bioses and it also means that if a flash fails for whatever reason you
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can recover it relatively easily compared to Prior cards the fact that
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it's got the dual x cooler means that you've got significantly better cooling
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than the stock fan and I'm going to be covering that in an upcoming video where
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I compare the dual x cooler especially in an overclocked scenario I against the
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reference cooler and uh okay cooler and
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quieter overclock ready PCI Express uh
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3.0 is you know what why don't we talk more about the technology once we get
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the card open cuz I'm sure that's what you guys want to see not like you know
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this and you know that kind of thing you
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guys are interested in the graphics card cuz I know what you guys are all about
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all right so here we go we find the
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video card inside I'm just going to put that away and force you guys to uh learn
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about the accessories before you get to see the graphics card itself I haven't
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actually seen one of these yet so I'm kind of excited to check it out we've
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got an HDMI to DVI adapter so that means the card will support dual DVI out of
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the box no problems we've also got a mini DisplayPort to DVI adapter which
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means you've got all the adapters you need is this uh active or passive that's
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an active adapter so you got everything you need to
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run um ifinity out of the box you've got
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a four pin Molex to six pin PCIe adapter
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and then a oh a dual Molex to a pin PCIe
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adapter these are rare I'm going to hold on to
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that all right what else we got here mini DisplayPort to sideways big
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DisplayPort good thinking Sapphire and I'll show you why that's important
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actually I'm going to set that aside Crossfire Bridge DVI to VGA adapter and
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finally an HDMI cable so that is I think
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they even say how long it is on the front includes HDMI cable aha that is a
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1.8 m HDMI cable so that's about 6 ft
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driver installation CD don't worry about that download the latest off the AMD
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website okay registration card cool and
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finally a quick start guide showing you how to quickly
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start it's a guide all
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right um so let's go ahead and throw that back in there you know what let's
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just let's just get all of this out of the way completely okay so this is the 7970 you
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know what I just realized it doesn't
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actually say anywhere that this is an overclocked card so I guess we'll find
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out if it's an overclocked card I know that it's very easy to turn it into an
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overclocked card actually just a sec sorry guys so yeah it's very easy to
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turn it into an overclocked card
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using back to the front of the Box the sapphire tricks tweak and overclock
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utility for Sapphire graphics card so you can use that to turn up the clock
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speed of the card and 797s are already
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renowned for being phenomenal overclockers so I my expectation is
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you'd be able to achieve a fairly significant overclock with this card so
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this uses as you can see a completely
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non-reference cooler so this is their dual x cooler this has dual 92 mm fans
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five heat pipes including two fat you
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know pH JT two fat heat pipes and the reason that they're using the two
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thicker ones is because these ones have further to carry away the heat so they
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need to be a little bit more efficient than the ones that are located directly
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over the GPU core itself you can actually see where the GPU is right down
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there can you see that cool um just SEC
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no never mind um and those ones are going much
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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
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one going off this way positioning them right under the fan also these fans Not
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only cool the GPU itself but also the
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components on the PCB so that means your memory which is covered by heat spreader
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so I'm going to show you the sort of the heat spreader is up here and over here
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and kind of there yep and it's you can see it here you can also see it down
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here you see that heat sink right there that's uh that's covering the vrm here
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these ones you can see are covering any of the memory chips any other misscellaneous chips that need cooling
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so they're going to be directly cooled by these fans as well
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so finally let's see what else we got here as far as cooling goes that's oh
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yeah sorry okay so I always like to cover this compared to the reference
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cooler which is a blower design which exhausts all of the air out the back of
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the case these perform significantly better I mean we're talking up to 15 20°
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underload better than a reference cooler they're also quieter due to the dual fan
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design and the like fat ludicrous heat pipes that are going on however the
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drawback is that if you don't have a case with adequate ventilation these can
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be a bit of a problem for for the temperatures of the other components in your system so make sure you got a
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decent case and then you have nothing to worry about okay moving on uh what do we
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got here dual x this actually a pretty slick looking card Slicker looking than
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Slick's room but not going to stop harping on that uh
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so power requirements we've got a six pin and an 8 Pin power connector at the
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back of the card in their usual locations on the back of the card we see
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we got a black PCB which in my personal opinion is more attractive than pretty
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much any other approach to that uh we've got dual Crossfire connectors so you can
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configure these in any number of manners in crossfire there's our switches for
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BIOS 1 and two there's your little switch so you can switch between
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different BIOS profiles that you load onto the card next we've got our PCI
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Express 3.0 16x slot providing up to double the bandwidth versus PCI Express
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2.0 however that does not turn into a doubling in performance so that's you
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know I mean you might see a couple percentage here and there where you are
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bandwidth limited but usually that's not the bottleneck where this is even more
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of an advantage is on platforms like z68 or the upcoming z77 where your SLI or
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your Crossfire slots are going to be running in 8X 8X mode now PCIe 3.0 8X
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has the same bandwidth as the last generation PCI Express 2.0 16x so that's
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where you really see uh that play out
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well for you okay so in terms of infinity you're going to want to use one
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DVI and two mini display ports because um if you're running a 120 HZ 1080p
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panel or anything above 1080 or 1920 x 1200 HDMI won't be enough to drive it
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however if you are running triple 1080ps then you can go DVI HDMI and one mini
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DisplayPort although the car does support up to four outputs using all
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four of these connectors bearing in mind though that if you want to use DVI and
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HDMI you have to use an active adapter for the DisplayPort SPS let me just see
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if there's anything I've missed here so Crossfire X is AMD ifinity 2.0 so that's
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the next generation of ifinity including support for stereo
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3D we covered 3 gigs of memory 3 gigs of memory is a big Advantage versus the
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competition so the gtx680 does outperform the 7970 at stock clocks
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however once you start overclocking especially if you're not comfortable
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overvolting as you guys may or may not have seen in my GTX 680 review the
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performance Gap Narrows significantly and the 7970 starts to look like a
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better performer then there's the fact that it also has 3 gigs of memory on
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board what that means is if you're running a triple monitor setup you have
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to load those textures into the memory of your card regardless because yeah
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Slick's not running a triple monitor setup uh we're laughing at his monitors
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they're awesome um right you have to load all of those
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textures into the graphics memory um even if you have multiple cards it all
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has to go into each graphics card so the higher higher the resolution you're
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running at the more you need that memory especially for modern games and upcoming
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games so that's a big Advantage I think for the 7970 for multim monitor Gamers
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and I think that pretty much covers it it also supports 4K displays as well as
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HDMI with 3D and thank you for checking out my
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unboxing of the sapphire hd7970
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dual x graphics card I look forward to doing a little bit of an overclocking
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comparison as as well as Cooling and Acoustics comparison versus the
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reference 7970 and I can tell you guys now my expectation is it's going to
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absolutely blow it away don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings reviews and
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other computer videos sorry guys I promised to talk
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about why this was so important and then I totally forgot so this is important
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because once the card is installed in your system and you go like this if you
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had two adapters that went this way or even one adapter that went this way
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you'd be blocking other ports with the cable that plugs into it it and with the
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wideness of it so that's why this is way smarter than other implementations that
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I've seen of these kinds of adapters in the past