Posted on Friday, December 16 2011 @ 22:49 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
TPU
spotted slides that detail the AMD Radeon HD 7970 reference board. The card sticks with AMD's traditional black & red color scheme and uses a full-coverage vapor-chamber cooler. One interesting aspect of the card is that the display connectors now take up only one slot, meaning the card is truly single-slot capable in combination with a single-slot full-coverage waterblock.
A welcome change here from the previous generations, is that the card is truly single-slot capable, when say, a single-slot full-coverage water block is used. High-end cards from previous generation HD 5000 and HD 6000 have a dual DVI connector cluster that extends into two expansion slots, which many enthusiasts found to be annoying, especially when setting up benches with four single-GPU graphics cards in scenarios where PCI-Express slot spacing isn't kind. Moving on to display connectivity, the card has one DVI, one HDMI, and two mini-DisplayPort connectors, all arranged in the confines of a single expansion slot. The space of the second slot is dedicated to a hot-air exhaust of the cooling assembly. All board partners are required to ship HDMI-to-DVI dongles, and active mini-DP dongles.
Just like the Radeon HD 6900 series, the HD 7900 offers two BIOS chips, one "unprotected" and one "protected" to recover from failed flashing. Additionally, the last slide reveals the card will overclock to at least 1GHz with the reference cooler.
