Radeon HD 7970 Graphics Card Announced

AMD has officially announced the Radeon HD 7970 (Tahiti XT chip), which will be the fastest graphics card with a single GPU on the market. The new Tahiti graphics processor is made on the 28 nm process technology, consists of 2048 stream processors with a clock frequency of 925 MHz. The processor is built on the architecture of Graphics Core Next, which replaced the VLIW4. The board also has 3 GB of GDDR5 memory connected via a 384-bit bus.

The card supports DX11.1 rendering and shows record performance in tests, by about 15-20% ahead of the flagship single-processor product Nvidia GeForce GTX 580, and in some tests the Radeon HD 7970 is quite comparable with dual-processor cards.

Other specs Radeon HD 7970
Number of texture units: 128, blending units: 32
Effective memory frequency: 5500 MHz (4 × 1375 MHz)
Memory Bandwidth: 264 GB / s
Theoretical maximum fill rate: 29.6 gigapixel / s
Theoretical texture sampling rate: 118.4 gigatexel / s
Two CrossFire connectors
PCI Express 3.0 bus
Connectors: DVI Dual Link, HDMI 1.4, two Mini-DisplayPort 1.2
Power consumption: up to 250 W
One 8-pin and one 6-pin power connectors
Dvuhslotovy design
Recommended price for the US market: $ 549
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At first, the cost of the Radeon HD 7970 will be $ 549, but it has already begun to lower prices for cards of previous generations. For many, this is the most important good news in connection with the release of a new flagship. For example, the Radeon HD 6870 presented a year ago has already fallen in price from $ 239 to $ 140. Home sales Radeon HD 7970 is scheduled for January 9.

The effectiveness of the Radeon HD 7970 for mining bitcoins is questionable. With a high initial investment, the card gives a very small performance advantage, even compared to 5870, and in terms of price ratio megayeshi / s significantly loses.



However, due to the significant increase in prices for bitcoins in the last two months, even buying a Radeon HD 7970 can be profitable.

Radeon HD 7970 is one of the first video cards made on 28 nm process technology. The miniaturization of transistors promises a theoretical increase in chip performance to 3.79 teraflops.





See reviews of the Radeon HD 7970 on 3DNews and ixbt .