A Closer Look

AMD's fansink uses a large area vapor chamber cooler to keep the GPU cool. You can also see the thermal pads for twelve memory chips and the VRM circuitry.


The card requires one 8-pin and one 6-pin PCI-Express power cable for operation. This power configuration is good for up to 300 W of power draw.


The HD 7970 comes with AMD's dual BIOS feature that was introduced with the HD 6900 Series. It provides a safety net in case a BIOS flash goes wrong; simply switch to the second BIOS and flash back to the original BIOS.


For voltage control the card uses the CHiL CHL8228 chip, the same model found on the regular HD 7970, which means that software voltage control should be working with existing software.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix, and carry the model number H5GQ2H24AFR-R0C. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


AMD's Tahiti graphics processor introduced the GCN shader architecture, it is also the first GPU to be produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC. The transistor count is 4.31 billion.

Visually the GHz Edition GPU looks exactly the same as the regular Tahiti GPU. According to AMD both chips are made from the same wafers, with one receiving better binning.