 Welcome to a very random unboxing. We are in the one and only Slick's room that he rents. And apparently he's seven. Do you like his cars tight switch cover? No, seriously though, we are. He claims he's taking it down this weekend, but I don't believe it for a second because I know he loves it. Composer. Welcome to my unboxing of the Radeon HD 7970 Dual X OC from Sapphire. This is an overclocked card that is based on the 7970 GPU, which means you got three gigs of GDDR5 memory at ludicrous clock speeds. You got a 28 nanometer GPU supporting all of the latest technologies. You've got dual bios, which means that you can set different overclocking profiles within different bios. And it also means that if a flash fails for whatever reason, you can recover it relatively easily compared to prior cards. The fact that it's got the Dual X cooler means that you've got significantly better cooling than the stock fan, and I'm going to be covering that in an upcoming video where I compare the Dual X cooler, especially in an overclocked scenario against the reference cooler. And okay, cooler and quieter, overclock ready. PCI Express 3.0 is like, you know what? Why don't we talk more about the technology once we get the card open? Because I'm sure that's what you guys want to see, not like, you know, this and you know, that kind of thing. You guys are interested in the graphics card because I know what you guys are all about. All right. So here we go. We find the video card inside. I'm just going to put that away and force you guys to learn about the accessories before you get to see the graphics card itself. I haven't actually seen one of these yet, so I'm kind of excited to check it out. We've got an HDMI to DVI adapter, so that means the card will support dual DVI out of the box, no problems. We've also got a mini display port to DVI adapter, which means you've got all the adapters you need. Is this active or passive? That's an active adapter. So you've got everything you need to run iFINITY out of the box. You've got a four pin Molex to six pin PCIe adapter and then a, oh, a dual Molex to eight pin PCIe adapter. These are rare. I'm going to hold on to that. All right. What else we got here? Mini display port to sideways big display port. Good thinking Sapphire. And I'll show you why that's important actually. I'm going to set that aside. Crossfire bridge, DVI to VGA adapter, and finally an HDMI cable. So that is, I think they even say how long it is on the front. Includes HDMI cable. Aha! That is a 1.8 meter HDMI cable, so that's about six feet. Driver installation CD, don't worry about that. Download the latest off the AMD website. Okay. Registration card, cool. And finally a quick start guide showing you how to quickly start. It's a guide. All right. So let's go ahead and throw that back in there. You know what? Let's just, let's just get all of this out of the way completely. Okay. So this is the 7970. You know what? I just realized it doesn't actually say anywhere that this is an overclocked card. So I guess we'll find out if it's an overclocked card. I know that it's very easy to turn it into an overclocked card. Wait just a sec. Sorry guys. So yeah, it's very easy to turn it into an overclocked card using, back to the front of the box, the Sapphire Trix tweak and overclock utility for Sapphire graphics card. So you can use that to turn up the clock speed of the card. And 7970s are already renowned for being phenomenal overclockers. So my expectation is you'd be able to achieve a fairly significant overclock with this card. So this uses, as you can see, a completely non-reference cooler. So this is their Dual X cooler. This has dual 92 millimeter fans, five heat pipes, including two fat, you know, P-H-A-T, two fat heat pipes. And the reason that they're using the two thicker ones is because these ones have further to carry away the heat. So they need to be a little bit more efficient than the ones that are located directly over the GPU core itself. You can actually see where the GPU is right down there. Can you see that? Cool. Just a sec. Nope, never mind. And those ones are going much closer to where they're going to be cooled directly by the fan. So you can see we've got two going off this way and one going off this way, positioning them right under the fans. Also, these fans not only cool the GPU itself, but also the components on the PCB. So that means your memory, which is covered by a heat spreader. So I'm going to show you the sort of the heat spreader is up here and over here and kind of there. Yep. And it's, you can see it here. You can also see it down here. You see that heat sink right there. That's covering the VRM. Here these ones you can see are covering any of the memory chips, any other miscellaneous chips that need cooling. So they're going to be directly cooled by these fans as well. So finally, let's see what else we got here. As far as cooling goes, that's pretty, oh yeah, sorry. Okay. So I always like to cover this. Compared to the reference cooler, which is a blower design, which exhausts all of the air out the back of the case, these perform significantly better. I mean, we're talking up to 15, 20 degrees under load better than a reference cooler. They're also quieter due to the dual fan design and the like fat ludicrous heat pipes that are going on. However, the drawback is that if you don't have a case with adequate ventilation, these can be a bit of a problem for the temperatures of the other components in your system. So make sure you got a decent case and then you have nothing to worry about. Okay. Moving on. What do we got here? Dual X. This is actually a pretty slick looking card. Slicker looking than slick's room, but not going to stop harping on that. So power requirements. We've got a six pin and an eight pin power connector at the back of the card in their usual locations. On the back of the card, we see we've got a black PCB, which in my personal opinion is more attractive than pretty much any other approach to that. We've got dual crossfire connectors, so you can configure these in any number of manners and crossfire. There's our switches for BIOS one and two. There's your little switch so you can switch between different BIOS profiles that you load onto the card. Next, we've got our PCI Express 3.0 60 neck slot providing up to double the bandwidth versus PCI Express 2.0. However, that does not turn into a doubling in performance. So that's, you know, I mean, you might see a couple percentage here and there where you are bandwidth limited, but usually that's not the bottleneck. Where this is even more of an advantage is on platforms like Z68 or the upcoming Z77 where your SLI or your crossfire slots are going to be running in 8x8x mode. Now PCIe 3.0 8x has the same bandwidth as the last generation PCI Express 2.0 16x. So that's where you really see that play out well for you. Okay, so in terms of iFINITY, you're going to want to use one DVI and two mini display ports because if you're running a 120 hertz 1080p panel or anything above 1920 by 1200, HDMI won't be enough to drive it. However, if you are running triple 1080p, then you can go DVI, HDMI and one mini display port, although the card does support up to four outputs using all four of these connectors. Bearing in mind though, that if you want to use DVI and HDMI, you have to use an active adapter for the display port ports. Let me just see if there's anything I've missed here. So Crossfire X is AMD iFINITY 2.0. So that's the next generation of iFINITY including support for stereo 3D. We covered three gigs of memory. Three gigs of memory is a big advantage versus the competition. So the GTX 680 does outperform the 7970 at stock clocks. However, once you start overclocking, especially if you're not comfortable overvolting, as you guys may or may not have seen in my GTX 680 review, the performance gap narrows significantly and the 7970 starts to look like a better performer. Then there's the fact that it also has three gigs of memory on board. What that means is if you're running a triple monitor setup, you have to load those textures into the memory of your card regardless. Because yeah, Slick's not running a triple monitor setup. We're laughing at his monitors. They're awesome. Right, you have to load all of those textures into the graphics memory. Even if you have multiple cards, it all has to go into each graphics card. So the higher the resolution you're running at, the more you need that memory, especially for modern games and upcoming games. So that's a big advantage, I think, for the 7970 for multi-monitor gamers. And I think that pretty much covers it. It also supports 4K displays as well as HDMI with 3D. And thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Sapphire HD 7970 Dual X graphics card. I look forward to doing a little bit of an overclocking comparison as well as cooling and acoustics comparison versus the reference 7970. And I can tell you guys now my expectation is it's going to absolutely blow it away. Don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos. Sorry guys, I promised to talk about why this was so important and then I totally forgot. So this is important because once the card is installed in your system and you go like this, if you had two adapters that went this way, or even one adapter that went this way, you'd be blocking other ports with the cable that plugs into it and with the wideness of it. So why this is way smarter than other implementations that I've seen of these kinds of adapters in the past.