Introduction

AMD's Radeon HD 7970 has been on the market for a while now. The card introduced a new shader architecture and brought numerous improvements in power consumption. It met heavy opposition from NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 and 670, which has caused HD 7970's pricing to go down quite a bit.

We have seen several recent releases of premium HD 7970 variants geared towards overclocking through high clock-speeds and maximum cooling-power. Prominent members of these cards are the ASUS MATRIX, MSI Lightning, Gigabyte SuperOC, and Sapphire Toxic.



HIS is now entering the arena with their HD 7970 X Turbo, which, unlike many other enthusiast HD 7970 cards, comes in a dual-slot form factor. The clock speeds have been increased significantly to 1180 MHz on the GPU, which is the highest GPU clock we've seen on an HD 7970, and 1500 MHz on the memory; only the ASUS MATRIX comes with a higher memory clock.

Price-wise, HIS is also asking a lot. The card can be yours for $600.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• DVI adapter
• CrossFire Bridge
• Active single-link mini-DP to DVI adapter
• "Weight Lifter" to support the card in the case

The Card

HIS is using a large dual-fan cooler with a stylized X in the center. The back of the card is bare; other companies put something here to protect the card against damage, or to help with cooling.


Installation of the card requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options includes one DVI port, one full-sized HDMI port, and four mini-HDMI ports. You may use all the outputs at the same time, but doing so makes the DVI port a single-link port (up to 1920x1080). If you want to run higher resolutions, you have to press the blue button. It switches the DVI port to dual-link by disabling one of the DisplayPorts. Unlike other cards with a similar feature, this switch is instant and you don't have to reboot.

The GPU also includes an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible, which includes HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies support.


Two CrossFire connectors are available, so you may combine this card with up to three other HD 7970s for improved performance.


Pictured above are the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods, etc., please include a link back to this site, or let us post your article.