ASUS HD 7970 - HD7970-3GD5
This 7970 edition of ASUS is practically a reference card, i.e. the cooling is a consequence of AMD's intellectual work and also follows the factory recommendations in clockwork. The HD 7970 is not a small piece, of course there is nothing surprising about it. Length is 27,6 cm, width is 10 cm, and thickness is 3,3 cm, let’s calculate with these numbers if we have a tighter computer case. The printed circuit board is red or black (ours was the latter), but this is practically only evident from the back of the card and the thin area above the PCI Express interface because the cooling of the card covers almost the entire surface.
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The solution is very similar to the previous generation, only the design has changed a bit, the square edges have been replaced by graceful curves, the warm air is expelled by the fan outside the house. At the back of the card, in the usual place, you will find the two PCI Express power connectors, one with 6 pins and the other with 8 pins, through which the VGA can absorb a total of 225 watts, which is further supported by the 75 watts available on the PCI Express bus. It can be fed a maximum of 300 watts.
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At the other end of the top of the PCB are the two CrossFireX bridges, with their help you can connect up to four HD 7970s, creating a terribly high computing power. We can also discover a small microswitch here, which is not a completely new thing, since we have already encountered this solution on the HD 6970 and HD 6950. The essence of the matter is that two BIOSes can be accessed using the switch, one is a safety, non-modifiable ROM with factory settings, while the other is an EEPROM with overwriting and modification options, so tuning can even be done at the BIOS level without we should be particularly concerned. We can also report some changes to the outputs compared to the Cayman models. The upper half of the back panel has become completely "free", i.e. the ventilation grille extends across the entire width, giving additional space for hot air to flow out.
One of the two dual-link DVIs hurt this, meaning that now only one DVI is available (let’s face it, seeing the other connectors, it’s survivable). Next to it is a native HDMI 1.4a, which is unique in that it operates at 3 GHz, so it also supports 4096 × 2160 pixel resolution displays, and is capable of transmitting FULL HD stereo 3D material at 60 frames.
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We get two more miniDisplay ports with a 1.2 standard that also knows the latest technologies, Eyefinity has moved to version 2.0, where each display can receive a separate 8-channel sound. The box of the 7970 has been given the standard ASUS design, in which, in addition to the manual and the installation disc, we also get two molex-> PCI Express power converters, a CrossFireX bridge and two miniDisplayport-DVI converters.
