Today is launch-day for AIB-branded Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards, also the day you'll be able to buy your card from stores. Sapphire is naturally part of the launch party, with its base-model Radeon HD 7970 graphics card. In the weeks ahead, it will launch the rest of its exhaustive lineup of graphics cards based on this GPU. Sapphire's "Da Original" Radeon HD 7970 graphics card is based entirely on AMD's reference design, with a black-colored PCB. It sticks to AMD reference clock speeds of 925 MHz core, and 5.50 GHz memory, packing 3 GB of memory. Based on the 28 nm "Tahiti" GPU, the Radeon HD 7970 is a DirectX 11.1-compatible graphics card, packing 2048 stream processors, and a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface. It will be priced at around US $550.