 Alright, so you guys have asked me for this and I'm sorry, okay, I am gonna make excuses because honestly I did not get a review sample card so I wasn't able to do that and then I had to go to CES so I wasn't able to do it. I was preparing to go and then I was gone and then now I'm back and now I'm getting caught up. So yes, I am finally doing my unboxing of the Radeon HD 7970 that you've probably seen somebody do a video about it already at this point and yes they were faster than me and yes that's okay, my ego is not too damaged by not being the first one to unbox this on the YouTube. So here we go. Today's card is gonna be from PowerColor although honestly at launch that's not terribly important because most partners are not gonna have any kind of non-reference design cards. XFX does have a card that is using a non-reference cooler however it is still using the reference PCB and reference components. This is the way it works with all launch cards particularly on the high end for both AMD and Nvidia so whatever you're about to look at inside this PowerColor box is short of a couple accessories, maybe a game bundle here or there, pretty much exactly what you would find inside the box of one of PowerColor's competitors which is to say that PowerColor given that their price is pretty good is probably a fairly good choice for a 7970. Alright we have a driver disc which you shouldn't use, you should download the latest. We have professional cooling system. Oh no these are just, this is just ads for like other PowerColor stuff as well as a quick start guide. We have a Dirt 3 code which you don't get to have because it belongs to whoever ends up with this card which might be me, you never know. I'm kind of liking the 7970 at this point in time. This is a 28 nanometer graphics card so I shouldn't say it's a 28 nanometer graphics card because it's clearly a lot bigger than 28 nanometers but what it is is it is using a 28 nanometer GPU so that is the manufacturing process and I'm going to finally extract these accessories. There we go, oh thank you for catching that. So what that means is basically lower power consumption than previous manufacturing processes so that means that AMD has the ability to squeeze 4.3 billion transistors into a space that previously they were not able to because you guys got to understand there's the overhead of R&D when you're producing chips and then other than that, the actual cost of the silicon wafer doesn't vary a whole lot from process node to process node. I mean you can get slightly more expensive materials as you keep going but the whole idea is that if you can build more transistors in a smaller area, the chip, the whole thing actually costs less but if they take the other approach and they build just more transistors into the same area then it will cost the same but it will be more powerful and that's what we have with the Radeon 7970. So it supports up to 4 displays in iFINITY mode so you've got your DVI, your HDMI as well as dual mini display port. There you go. I'm just going to put those plugs back in. Hate for something to leak out of them or something. Although I don't think that's likely to happen with this particular graphic. On the back you can see... Oh okay here here here. No, it's just fine. We'll just take them all off there. Alright, what else is cool? So 28nm GPU. Oh right, 384 bit memory bus. So AMD has somehow managed to put all of the graphics memory on the other side of the PC B which is pretty densely packed. You can actually see where they are here. And so what that means is huge, massive memory bandwidth. So we're still using GDDR5 but we are able to write to it and read from it more quickly. So enormous bandwidth, also an enormous frame buffer. This card has a 3GB frame buffer. Now we've seen this before. GTX 580 had a 3GB frame buffer but honestly the GPU wasn't really powerful enough to take advantage of it anyhow. GTX 590 had a 3GB frame buffer. So did Radeon 69... No, 6990 was 4GB, sorry about that. So 590 had a 3GB frame buffer but when you're running two GPUs in SLI or Crossfire you're only able to take advantage of half of that frame buffer. So if you were to take two of these 3GB cards and run them in Crossfire you would have 3GB of effective memory whereas if you took a GTX 590 and ran it in your system it's running in SLI by default. You actually only have 1.5GB which is fine for single display up to huge resolutions but if you want to go multi-monitor gaming it's probably not going to be suitable in the latest games running at very high detail settings. Another new thing about this graphics card is it uses PCI Express 3.0. So what is the relevance of that you might ask? And the relevance of that I would answer is very little. I'm actually wandering around now looking to see if I can find a Gen 3 motherboard. Ah, you know what, don't worry about it. Okay, so there's a couple motherboards on the Z68 platform. I'm going to walk around this way. Let's go look at the card I guess for now. There's a couple motherboards on the Z68 platform that are using PCIe Gen 3 compatible slots but right now it doesn't even work because Ivy Bridge, Intel's upcoming CPU which will have a PCIe Gen 3 controller on board isn't even out yet. So basically these motherboards are just saying they're ready for you to drop in a new CPU and a new graphics card to get Gen 3 compatibility. So there's that. And there's also the fact that PCI Express 16x like Gen 1, PCI Express 16x is still plenty for a single graphics card. So what does this mean to you? Well every time we go up a generation in PCI Express we are doubling the available bandwidth. So PCIe 2 is 2 times the bandwidth of PCIe 1 and PCIe Gen 3 is 4 times the bandwidth of PCIe Gen 1. What that means is that a PCIe Gen 2 8x slot which is what we find on Z68 boards is already capable of feeding a high end graphics card pretty much no matter how high end it is. So with PCIe Gen 3 we're going to get the ability to run high end graphics cards in our PCIe 4x slots. That looks to be about it. So we may actually be able to run like 3 way SLI and crossfire setups on like 4444 slot layouts and not have any performance hits. So I guess that's cool but I mean Motherboard's already had so many PCIe slots with so much bandwidth I'm not that concerned about it just right now. So there you go PCIe Gen 3 so yes more bandwidth is probably better at some point but right now I don't think it's going to make that much of a difference. It has a sticker on it. Huh. H7970... Huh, funny. Okay. It has a... What we've come to expect is a standard AMD blower cooler fan, which is great because it means it's exhausting all of the air out the back of the case, so you're not gonna have this thing reheating itself, although it runs surprisingly quiet and cool considering that this is bar none by a significant margin the fastest single GPU graphics card on the planet. So yes, it does lose to the 590. It does lose to the 699, but it is faster than a GTX 580, which was the previous king of the castle, and it also overclocks like a beast. Speaking of overclocking, you've got two BIOS profiles here, so you can keep one at factory default, you can flash alternate BIOSes to the other one and play around with it, and see how far you can push this card. AMD has built in that modability to their cards, which... Hold on, let me just put this down. Which is awesome, so I personally appreciate that very, very much. I think we've pretty much wrapped up here. I don't think I see anything on my notes over there that looks relevant. So thank you for checking out my unboxing, and by this time it's probably about your 18th look at the Radeon H7970. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos. I'm clearly out of practice because I forgot to show you it has an 8-pin and a 6-pin power connector, and I also forgot to show you the included accessories. So it does have HDMI to DVI, mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort, mini DisplayPort to... Is this active? Oh, active DVI, cool. So it does support dual DVI right out of the box, triple DVI right out of the box. Wow, you have everything you need to run iFindy right out of the box. And then a 6-pin to 8-pin power adapter, a DVI to VGA adapter, and finally a Crossfire connector.