Gigabyte AMD Radeon HD 6970 Video Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,546 words · ~7 min read
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So today we're going to be doing a quick unboxing of the all-new Radeon
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HD60970. So I'm going to start with a bit of an explanation of a couple
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things. First of all, I'm going to explain the numbering scheme on this
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card. So AMD used to have a numbering
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scheme that went okay uh 5970 was their highestend dual GPU card
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and then 5870 was their fastest single
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GPU card and then 5850 was the the next
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one down and then 5770 was a different class of GPU. That used to be how it
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worked. Now with the 6000 series they've actually changed it. So the 6870 is not
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the replacement for the 5870. I've seen some confusion in the comments under my
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videos about this concept. The 6870 is
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actually the replacement for the 5770 and the
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6970 is the price point replacement for the
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5870. And then there will actually be another card coming later that will be a
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dual GPU solution because that's AMD's whole strategy is build a scalable GPU
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at a reasonable size with reasonable power so that you can slap two of them
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together. Cool stuff. All right, so the 6T970, first thing we're going to
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notice, it has 2 gigs of DDDR5. So, what that means is you have double the frame
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buffer, bigger textures, all that good stuff. In terms of performance, it's
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hard to say how much of a performance difference there is right now, but I've
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got a feeling we might be able to compare it to a 1 gig version further on
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down the line. Now, the only 2 gig
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version we had of the 5870 was actually the Iffinity 6 edition, as well as a
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couple custom cards. And uh it did make a small impact on that particular card,
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but this one's faster, so we might see more of a difference. It's a Gigabyte
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card, so it comes with a 3-year warranty in the US and Canada. And here we have a
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convenient list of all of the features that you need to know about. Full
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DirectX11, AMD Infinity multi-dis technology, hence the multi-dis behind
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me. Uh supports up to four monitors, although I don't know that that's
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necessarily the recommended configuration. Uh supports PCI Express
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2.1, 1080p full HD. Duh. supports this,
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never mind 1080p AMD HD 3D technology,
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including HDMI 1.4A for 3D Blu-ray and
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7.1 HD surround sound over HDMI as well
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as DisplayPort 1.2. Okay, let's see if there's anything
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else relevant on the back. Oh, yeah, tessellation. So, the 6000 series is all
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about tessellation performance. That's one of the ways that these new graphics
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cards are going to significantly improve performance, and I mean destroy over the
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5000 series cards. One of the other things that AMD has really beefed up is
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the anti-aliasing capability of this particular graphics card. We've got a
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couple new modes that are going to basically without um a huge impact on
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performance allow you to either have higher quality anti-aliasing or cheaper
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that is less performance impact anti-aliasing. Here's a driver CD. Throw
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it away. Here is a manual. Read through it and then keep it or throw it away. I
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guess it doesn't really matter to me. Next, we have adapters. So, uh based on
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the fact that we have a dual Molex to six pin and a dual Molex to 8 pin. By
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the way, this is a lot smarter than most of the eight pin adapters I see, which
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are dual six pin to 8 pin, which is ridiculous. Dual Molex to 8 pin. That
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makes sense. Good job, Gigabyte. That is a good thing to include. We have a
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Crossfire bridge, standard length for standard
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spacing motherboards. Any of the non-standard ones should come with their
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own Crossfire bridge anyway. And then we have the card itself. It's quite heavy
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actually. It's a lot of lot of weight to it for a uh single GPU AMD card. So,
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let's go ahead and get this baby opened
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up. Got our anti-static baggie with a piece of tape
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here. And we will see the 6970 in all
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its glory. That is a beastly looking
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card. I really like Gigabytes graphics on here. I know that in a lot of cases
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you can't really see the the VGA sticker, but I'm going to go ahead and
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say, "Yeah, I I really like it anyway because it matters to me cuz I'm shallow
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like that." All right. So, in terms of the overall look of the card, it's very
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similar to the 6870. We've got that same distinctive black and white, black and
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white, red and black stripe thing going on on the top of the card. We have a
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ventilation hole here. So, something to be aware of. And I did see some comments
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about this in that build I did in the Fractal Design Define R3 with two
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high-end GPUs is that if you have an exhaust here and you have a side fan
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kind of over it, you want to make sure that's going out rather than like
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pushing against the natural air flow direction of the card. So that was why I
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had done it that way. And we've also got two Crossfire bridges for support uh
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with support for either up to three-way Crossfire X. Okay. Here for here, let's
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look at the power as well. Uh here we've got, as I mentioned before, one six pin,
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one 8 pin power connector. So this is quite a beefy card. And there seems to
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be some kind of a DIP switch here. That's interesting. I know that um it
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can be used for flashing the BIOS, but I don't know what else it's good
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for. Well, we'll figure that out later. Okay, moving around to the back of the
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card, we've got the same basic look here. So, it's going to look quite sharp
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no matter what case you install it in. And then down at the bottom of the card,
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we find nothing of note other than a PCI Express connector. Now, I love this
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shroud on the back of the card is like the best idea ever because I don't want
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to see, you know, what green or red or
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blue PCB you're using. You know what?
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Just a nice black shrouded heat sink.
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It's functional. Looks great. I approve of this message. And uh oh, you can see
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that there's actually two-part construction to the shroud that goes on the front. So, there's the plastic part
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and then this part appears to actually be made of plastic. Can't
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tell. Metal. I'm pretty sure it's metal cuz I think that's part of the uh of the
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heat sink. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The bottom part is metal. So, that's part of the heat sink that actually
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cools the VRM, RAM chips, all that other good stuff. All right. Let's move around
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to the business end of the card where we will find all of our connectivity
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options. Now, bear in mind, you can't use all of these at the same time. So,
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if you want to run three displays, that means you can run any two of the DVI or
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HDMI and then at least one DisplayPort. If you want to run four displays, any
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two of these, and two DisplayPort, so be aware of that. Multi- display, you
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will probably need to use DisplayPort at some point. We've got a half open uh
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PCI slot for ventilation. So, that explains why they needed the extra
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ventilation room uh here on the top of
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the card so that you can exhaust. So, basically, this is kind of I'd consider
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this a half and half between external exhaust and internal exhaust. So,
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um yeah, there's not really much else to say about that. Now, oh, this is
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interesting. Look at that. This card does not include a DVI to VGA adapter.
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So, as per my recommendation that if you're buying a high-end card, you
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should probably throw that VGA monitor away, uh, Gigabyte seems to have taken
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that to heart, and they don't think you need a VGA adapter for this particular card. Although, I can tell you right
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now, it will work if you use an adapter from DVI to VGA. So, thank you for
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checking out my unboxing of the Radeon HD6970. And I'm just going to turn off
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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
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flashing the BIOS. That's uh pretty much all the details I have right now. Don't
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