Gadgetory

all right so you guys have asked me for this and I'm sorry okay I am gonna make excuses because honestly I did not get a review sample card so I wasn't able to do that and then I had to go to CES so I wasn't able to do it I was preparing to go and then I was gone and then now I'm back and now I'm cat getting caught up so yes I am finally doing my unboxing of the Radeon HD 7970 that you've probably seen somebody do a video about it already at this point and yes they were faster than me and yes that's okay um my ego is not too damaged by not being the first one to unbox this on the YouTube so here we go today's card is going to be from power color although honestly at launch that's not terribly important because most partners are not going to have any kind of non-reference design cards XFX does have a card that is using a non-reference cooler however it is still using the reference PCB and reference components this is the way it works with all launch cards particularly on the high end for both AMD and NVIDIA so whatever you're about to look at inside this power color box is sort of a couple accessories maybe a game bundle here they're pretty much exactly what you would find inside the box of one of power colors competitors which is to say that our color given that their price is pretty good is probably a fairly good choice for a 7970 all right we have a driver disc which you shouldn't use you should download the latest we have professional cooling system oh no these are just this is just ads for like other power color stuff as well as a QuickStart guide we have a dirt three code which you don't get to have because it belongs to whoever ends up with this card ah which might be me you never know I'm kind of like in the 79 70 at this point in time this is a 28 nanometer graphics card so now that I shouldn't say it's a 28 nanometer graphics card because it's clearly a lot bigger than 28 nanometers but what it is is is using a 28 nanometer GPU that is the manufacturing process and I'm going to finally extract these accessories there we go oh thank you for catching that so what that means is basically lower power consumption than previous manufacturing processes so that means that AMD has the ability to squeeze 4.3 billion transistors into a space that previously they were not able to because you guys got to understand there's the overhead of R&D when you're producing chips and then other than that the actual cost of the silicon wafer doesn't vary a whole lot from process node to process node I mean you can get slightly more expensive materials as you keep going but the whole idea is that if you can build more transistors in a smaller area the chip the whole thing actually costs less but if they take the other approach and they build just more transistors into the same area that it'll cost the same but it'll be more powerful and that's what we have with the Radeon 7970 so it supports up to four displays in Eyefinity mode so you've got your DVI or HDMI as well as dual mini and DisplayPort there you go I'm just gonna put those plugs back in hate for hate for something to leak out of them or something although I don't think that's likely to happen this particular graphic crack on the back you can see okay here here here let's just fine we'll just take them all off there all right what else is cool so 28 nanometer GPU all right 384 bit memory bus so AMD s somehow managed to put all of the graphics memory on the other side of the PCB which is pretty pretty densely packed you can actually see where they are here and so what that means is huge massive memory bandwidth so we're still using gddr5 but we are able to write to it and read from it more quickly so enormous bandwidth also an enormous frame buffer this card has a three gigabyte frame buffer now we've seen this before GTX 580 have a three gig frame buffer but honestly the GPU wasn't really powerful enough to take advantage of it anyhow GTX 590 had a three gig frame buffer so did Radeon 69 note 6990 was 4 gig sorry about that so 590 had a 3 gig frame buffer but when you're running two GPUs in SLI or crossfire you're only able to take advantage of half of that frame buffer so if you were to take two of these three gig cards and run them in crossfire you would have three gigs of effective memory whereas if you took a GTX 590 and ran it in your system it's running an SLI by default you actually only have 1.5 gigs which is fine for single display up to huge resolutions but if you want to go multi monitor gaming it's probably not going to be suitable in the latest games running at very high detail settings another new thing about this graphics card is it uses PCI Express 3.0 so what is the relevance of that you might ask and the relevance of that I would answer is um very little I'm actually wandering around now looking to see if I can find again three motherboard I know what don't worry about it okay so there's a couple motherboards on the z68 platform I'm going to walk around this way let's go look at the card I guess for now there's a couple motherboards on the z68 platform that are using PCIe gen3 compatible slots but right now it doesn't even work because Ivy Bridge Intel's upcoming CPU which will have piece a PCIe gen3 controller on board isn't even out yet so we're basically these motherboards are just saying they're ready for you to open a new CPU and a new graphics card to get gen3 compatibility so there's that and there's also the fact that PCI Express 16 X like Gen 1 like PCI Express 16 X is still plenty for a single graphics card so what does this mean to you well every time we go up a generation in PCI Express we are doubling the available bandwidth so PCIe 2 is 2 times the bandwidth the PCIe 1 and PCIe gen3 is 4 times the bandwidth of PCIe Gen 1 what that means is that a PCIe gen to 8 X slot which is what we find on z68 boards is already capable of feeding a high-end graphics card pretty much no matter how I undo it no matter how high-end it is so with PCIe gen3 we're going to get the ability to run high-end graphics cards in our PCIe 4x slots that looks to be about it so we may actually be able to run like 3-way SLI and crossfire setups on like you know 4 4 4 4 slot layouts and not have any performance hits so I guess that's cool but I mean motherboards already has so many PCIe slots with so much bandwidth I'm not not concerned about it just right now so there you go PCIe gen3 so yes more bandwidth is probably better at some point but right now I don't think it's going to make that much of a difference has a sticker on it huh what the Radeon h7t 970 huh funny okay it has a what we've come to expect as a standard AMD blower cooler fan which is great because it means it's exhausting all of the air out the back of the case so you're not going to have this thing reheating itself although is runs surprisingly quiet and cool considering that this is Bar None by a significant margin the fastest single GPU graphics card on the planet so yes it does lose to the 590 it does lose to the 6990 faster than a GTX 580 which was the previous king of the castle and it also over clocks like a beast speaking of overclocking you've got two BIOS profiles here so you can keep one at factory default you can flash alternate bios's to the other one and play around with it and see how far you can push this card AMD has built in that mod ability to their cards which hold on let me split this down which is awesome so I personally appreciate that very very much I think we've pretty much wrapped up here I don't think I see anything on my notes over there that looks irrelevant so thank you for checking out my unboxing and by this time it's probably about your 18th look at the Radeon H 7970 don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos I'm clearly out of practice because I forgot to show you it has an 8 pin and a 6 pin power connector and I also forgot to show you the included accessories so it does have HDMI to DVI mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort mini DisplayPort to is this active Oh active DVI cool so it does support dual DVI right on the box triple DVI right out of the box wow you have everything you need to run eyefinity right out of the box and then a 6 pin 2 8 pin power adapter a DVI to vga adapter and finally a crossfire connector