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Sapphire HD 7970 OC 3GB Video Card With Twin-X Cooler Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips

2012-03-26
welcome to a very random unboxing we are in the one and only slicks room Betty breads and apparently he's seven doing his car strikes much cover no seriously though here we are he claims he's taking it down this weekend but I don't believe it for a second because I know he loves thick composure welcome to my unboxing of the Radeon HD 7970 dual X OC from sapphire this is an overclocked card that is based on the 7970 GPU which means you've got three gigs of gddr5 memory at ludicrous clock speeds you've got a 28 nanometer GPU supporting all of the latest technologies you've got dual BIOS which means that you can set different overclocking profiles within different biases and it also means that if a flash fails for whatever reason you can recover it relatively easily compared to prior cards the fact that it's got the dual X cooler means that you've got significantly better cooling than the stock fan and I'm going to be covering that in an upcoming video where I compare the dual x cooler especially in an overclocked scenario against the reference cooler and okay cooler and quieter overclock ready PCI Express 3.0 is like you know what won't we talk more about the technology once we get the card open because I'm sure that's what you guys want to see not like you know this and you know that kind of thing you guys are interested in the graphics card because I know what you guys are all about all right so here we go we find the video card inside I'm just gonna put that away and force you guys to learn about the accessories before you get to see the graphics card itself I haven't actually seen one of these yet so I'm kind of excited to check it out we've got an HDMI to DVI adapter so that means the card will support dual DVI out of the box no problems we've also got a mini DisplayPort to DVI adapter which means you've got all the adapters you need it's this active or passive that's an active adapter so you got everything you need to run umm Eyefinity out of the box you've got 4 pin molex to 6-pin PCI II adapter and then a Oh a dual molex to a pin PCIe adapter these are rare I'm gonna hold on to that alright what else we got here mini DisplayPort to sideways big DisplayPort good thinking sapphire and I'll show you why that's important actually I set aside crossfire bridge DVI to VGA adapter and finally an HDMI cable so that is I think they even say how long it is on the front includes HDMI cable haha that is a 1 point 8 meter HDMI cable so that's about 6 feet driver installation CD don't worry about that download the latest off the AMD website ok registration card cool and finally a quick start guide showing you how to quickly start it's a guide alright ah so let's go ahead and throw that back in there you know what let's just let's just get all this out of the way completely ok so this is the 7970 you know what I just realized it doesn't actually say anywhere that this is an overclocked card so I guess we'll find out if it's an overclocked card I know that it's very easy to turn it into an overclocked card actually just a sec sorry guys so yeah it's very easy to turn it into an overclocked card using em back to the front of the box the Sapphire tricks tweak and overclock utility for sapphire graphics cards so you can use that turn up the clock speed of the car and 79 70s are already renowned for being phenomenal overclockers so I've my expectation is you'd be able to achieve a fairly significant overclock with this card so this uses as you can see a completely non-reference cooler so this is their dual X cooler this has dual 92 millimeter fans five heat pipes including two fat you know pH 82 fat heat pipes and the reason that they're using the two thicker ones is because these ones have further to carry away the heat so they need to be a little bit more efficient than the ones that are located directly over the GPU core itself you can actually see where the GPU is right down there can you see that cool the sec nope never mind um and those ones are going much closer to where they're going to be cooled directly by the fan so you can see we've got two going off this way and one going off this way positioning them right under the fans also these fans not only cool the GPU self but also the components on the PCB so that means your memory which is covered by heat spreader so I'm going to show you the sort of the heat spreader as up here and over here and kind of there yeah and it's you can see it here you can also see it down here you see that heatsink right there that's that's covering the vrm here these ones you can see are covering any of the memory chips any other miscellaneous chips that need cooling so they're going to be directly cooled by these fans as well so finally let's see what else we got here as far as cooling goes that's oh yeah sorry okay so I always like to cover this compared to the reference cooler which is a blower design which exhausts all of the air on the back of the case these perform significantly better and we're talking up to 1520 degrees under load better than a reference cooler they're also quieter due to the dual fan design and the like phat ludicrous heat pipes that are going on however the drawback is that if you don't have a case with adequate ventilation these can be a bit of a problem for the temperatures of the other components in your system so make sure you got a decent case and then you have nothing to worry about okay moving on what up here dual-x is actually a pretty slick looking card slicker looking on slicks broom right not going to stop harping on that ah so power requirements we've got a six pin and an eight pin power connector at the back of the card in their usual locations on the back of the card we see we've got a black PCB which in my personal opinion is more attractive than pretty much any other approach to that we've got dual crossfire connectors so you can configure these in any number of manners in crossfire there's our switches for BIOS one and two there's your little switch so you can switch between different BIOS profiles that you load onto the card next we've got our PCI Express 3.0 16 X slot providing up to double the bandwidth vs. PCI Express 2.0 however that does not turn into a doubling in performance so that's you know I mean you might see a couple percentage here and there where you are bandwidth limited but usually that's not the bottleneck where this is even more of an advantage is on platforms like Z 68 or the upcoming z77 where your SLI or your crossfire slots are going to be running an 8 X 8 X mode now pcie 3.0 8 X has the same bandwidth as the last generation PCI Express 2.0 16 X so that's where you really see that play out well for you okay so in terms of Eyefinity you're going to want to use one DVI and too many display ports because if you're running a 120 Hertz 1080p panel or anything above 1080 or of 1920 by 1200 HDMI won't be enough to drive it however if you are running triple 1080 PS then you can go DVI HDMI and one mini DisplayPort although the card does support up to 4 outputs using all four of these connectors bearing in mind though that if you want to use DVI and HDMI you have to use an active adapter for the DisplayPort ports let me go see if there's anything I've missed here so crossfire X is red AMD Eyefinity 2.0 so that's the next generation of Eyefinity including support for stereo 3d we covered three gigs of memory three gigs of memory is a big advantage versus the competition so the GTX 680 does outperform the 7970 at stock clocks however once you start over walking especially if you're not comfortable over bolting as you guys may or may not have seen in my GTX 680 review the performance gap narrows significantly and the 7970 starts to look like a better performer then there's the fact that it also has three gigs of memory onboard what that means is if you're running a triple monitor setup you have to load those textures into the memory of your card regardless because yeah it's not running a triple monitor setup we're laughing at his monitors they're awesome um right you have to load all of those textures into the graphics memory um even if you have multiple cards it all has to go into each graphics card so the higher the resolution you're running at the more you need that memory especially for modern games and upcoming games so that's a big advantage I think for the 7970 for multi monitor gamers and I think that pretty much covers it it also supports 4k displays as well as HDMI with 3d and thank you for checking out my unboxing of the sapphire HD 7970 dual X graphics card I look forward to doing a little bit of an overclocking comparison as well as cooling and acoustics comparison verses the reference 7970 and I can tell you guys now my expectation this is going to absolutely blow it away don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos sorry guys I promise to talk about why this was so important and I totally forgot so this is important because once the card is installed in your system and you go like this if you had two adapters that went this way or even one adapter that went this way you'd be blocking other ports with the cable that plugs into it and with the wideness of it so that's why this is way smarter than other implementations that i've seen of these kinds of adapters in the past
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