Gadgetory

so today we're going to be doing a quick unboxing of the all-new Radeon HD 6970 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 Andy used to have a numbering scheme that went okay 59 70 was their highest end dual GPU card and then 5870 was their fastest single GPU card and then 58 50 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 68 70 is not the replacement for the 58 70 I've seen some confusion in the comments under my videos about this concept the 68 70 is actually the replacement for the 57 70 and the 69 70 is the price point replacement for the 58 70 and then there will actually be another card coming later that will be a dual GPU solution because that same DS 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 alright so the 69 70 first thing we're going to notice it has two gigs of DDR 5 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 eyefinity 6 Edition as well as a couple custom parts and 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 three-year warranty in the US and Canada and here we have the convenient list of all the features that you need to know about full DirectX 11 AMD eyefinity multi display technology hence the multi display behind me supports up to 4 monitors although I don't know that that's necessarily the recommended configuration supports PCI Express 2.0 1.8 EP full HD duh supports this never mind 1080p AMD HD 3d technology including hdmi 1.4 a 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 need to 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 you've got a couple new modes that are going to basically without 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 based on the fact that we have a dual x2 6 pin and a dual molex to 8 pin by the way this is a lot smarter than most of the 8 pin adapters I see which are dual 6 pin to 8 pin which is ridiculous do a molex tape and that makes sense good job gigabyte that is a good thing to include we have a crossfire bridge standard length 4 standards facing motherboards any of the non-standard ones should come with their own crossfire bridge anyway and then we have the part itself it's quite heavy actually it's a lot of lot of weight to it for a single GPU AMD card so let's go ahead and get this baby opened up on our anti-static baggy 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 really like it anyway because it matters to me because I'm shallow like that alright so in terms of the overall look at the card very similar to the 6870 we've got that same distinctive black and white are black and white red and black stripe thing going on on the top of the part 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 airflow direction of the card so that was why I had done it that way and we've also got two cross fire bridges for support with support for either up to 3-way crossfire X okay here further let's look at the power as well here we've got as I mentioned before one six pin one eight 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 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 you green or red or blue PCB you're using know what just a nice black shrouded heatsink functional looks great I approve of this message and 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 tell metal I'm pretty sure it's metal because I think that's part of the of the heatsink yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah the bottom part is metal so that's part of the heatsink 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 display days that means you can run any two of the DVI or HDMI and then at least one DisplayPort if you want to run for 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 PCI slot for ventilation so that explains why they needed the extra ventilation room 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 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 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 HD 6970 and I'm just going to turn off the camera for a sec find out what this dip switches for on the W die so it's something to do with flashing the BIOS that's pretty much all the details I have right now don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other awesome video content