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PowerColor HD 7970 Vortex Graphics Card Pictured

btarunr

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PowerColor is designing a non-reference Radeon HD 7970 graphics card, complete with its own PCB and cooler designs. For the cooler, PowerColor is designing an updated version of its Vortex II cooler featured on some of its older high-end graphics cards based on Radeon HD 6900 series GPUs. The cooler design is your typical aluminum fin-stack heatsink to which heat is fed by four 8 mm thick nickel-plated copper heat pipes. Ventilation is handled by two 80 mm fans, the frames of these fans are threaded and can be twisted to adjust the distance between the fan and the heatsink, adjusting its air-flow.

PowerColor also has a custom-design PCB to go with it, only the prototype pictured has no Tahiti GPU sitting on it, but PowerColor at least has a board design of its own at hand. The PCB draws power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, a CHIL-made controller handles voltage regulation. The VRM consists of a 9+1 phase design with a few other miscellaneous power domains. Those chokes appear to be slightly more cost-effective compared to the CPL-made ones featured on AMD's reference PCB. IR directFETs are replaced by cost-effective yet durable DrMOS chips.



The PCB features support for two EEPROM chips, which can be selected using a 2-way switch near the CrossFire connectors. Since the cooler isn't exactly designed to push hot air out from the rear of the case, PowerColor took the opportunity to add a second DVI connector, so now the display output layout resembles those of previous generation higher-end Radeons, with two each of DVI and mini-DisplayPort, and an HDMI. There's no word on the tentative launch date of this card.

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Good to see more 7970's with aftermarket coolers. I will probably go for a 7950 though, my old 4850 is beginning to hate me for the stress I'm putting on her :)
 

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Man that is one sexy card ! ;)
 
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Looks great but I always worry when I see the words "cost effective" on a high end GPU.
 
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Damn nice power array. I can't wait to see what Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI do with their customs. Easy, massive overclocks for anyone with proper coin? It's looking that way. I made the decision to hold off till April. If there's nothing to compete, I'll be grabbing some 7970 custom goodness. AMD played their cards right in letting board vendors do custom right out the gate. An nV fan sits extremely impressed..
 
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Wonder why actually care for cost-effectiveness in a card that's meant to be expensive. I doubt they did that to cut the selling price though.

An nV fan sits extremely impressed..

Not with the pricing though. But still, looking at the yield of the 28nm process with a new architecture, I can't wait to see what nvidia will unleash. If Kepler was to Fermi as Tahiti was to Cayman, I think I lost a few hundred bucks already.:rockout:
 
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Dayum look at them heat pipes sticking out o_o
 
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i really love full size graphic card with dual big fans paired with many heat pipes.
it looks :rockout:
 
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