 So today we're going to be doing a quick unboxing of the all-new Radeon HD 6970. So I'm going to start with a bit of an explanation of a couple things. First of all, I'm going to explain the numbering scheme on this card. So AMD used to have a numbering scheme that went, okay, 5970 was their highest-end dual GPU card, and then 5870 was their fastest single GPU card, and then 5850 was the next one down, and then 5770 was a different class of GPU. That used to be how it worked. Now with the 6000 series, they've actually changed it. So the 6870 is not the replacement for the 5870. I've seen some confusion in the comments under my videos about this concept. The 6870 is actually the replacement for the 5770, and the 6970 is the price point replacement for the 5870. And then there will actually be another card coming later that will be a dual GPU solution, because that's AMD's whole strategy, is build a scalable GPU at a reasonable size with reasonable power so that you can slap two of them together. Cool stuff. All right, so the 6970. First thing we're going to notice, it has two gigs of GDDR5. So what that means is you have double the frame buffer, bigger textures, all that good stuff. In terms of performance, it's hard to say how much of a performance difference there is right now, but I've got a feeling we might be able to compare it to a 1G version further on down the line. Now, the only 2G version we had of the 5870 was actually the iFINITY 6 edition, as well as a couple custom cards, and it did make a small impact on that particular card, but this one's faster, so we might see more of a difference. It's a gigabyte card, so it comes with a three-year warranty in the US and Canada, and here we have a convenient list of all of the features that you need to know about. FullDirect X11, AMD iFINITY multi-display technology, hence the multi-display behind me, supports up to four monitors, although I don't know that that's necessarily the recommended configuration, supports PCI Express 2.1, 1080p, full HD, duh, supports this, never mind 1080p, AMD HD 3D technology, including HDMI 1.4a for 3D Blu-ray, and 7.1 HD surround sound over HDMI, as well as DisplayPort 1.2. Okay, let's see if there's anything else relevant on the back. Oh yeah, TESOLATION. So, the 6000 series is all about TESOLATION performance. That's one of the ways that these new graphics cards are going to significantly improve performance, and I mean destroy, over the 5000 series cards. One of the other things that AMD has really beefed up is the anti-aliasing capability of this particular graphics card. You've got a couple new modes that are going to basically, without a huge impact on performance, allow you to either have higher quality anti-aliasing or cheaper, that is less performance impact, anti-aliasing. Here's a driver CD, throw it away, here is a manual, read through it, and then keep it or throw it away, I guess it doesn't really matter to me. Next we have adapters. So, based on the fact that we have a dual Molex to 6-pin and a dual Molex to 8-pin, by the way, this is a lot smarter than most of the 8-pin adapters I see, which are dual 6-pin to 8-pin, which is ridiculous. Dual Molex to 8-pin, that makes sense, good job Gigabyte, that is a good thing to include. We have a Crossfire Bridge, standard length, or standard spacing motherboards, any of the non-standard ones should come with their own Crossfire Bridge anyway. And then we have the card itself, it's quite heavy actually, it's a lot of weight to it for a single GPU AMD card, so let's go ahead and get this baby opened up. Got our anti-static baggie with a piece of tape here. And we will see the 6970 in all its glory, that is a beastly looking card. I really like Gigabyte's graphics on here. I know that in a lot of cases you can't really see the VGA sticker, but I'm going to go ahead and say yeah, I really like it anyway, because it matters to me, because I'm shallow like that. Alright, so in terms of the overall look of the card, it's very similar to the 6870, we've got that same distinctive black and white, or black and white, red and black stripe thing going on on the top of the card. We have a ventilation hole here, so something to be aware of, and I did see some comments about this. In that build I did in the Fractal Design Define R3 with two high-end GPUs, is that if you have an exhaust here and you have a side fan kind of over it, you want to make sure that's going out rather than pushing against the natural airflow direction of the card. So that was why I had done it that way. And we've also got two Crossfire bridges with support for either up to three-way Crossfire X. Okay, here for, here let's look at the power as well. Here we've got, as I mentioned before, one 6-pin, one 8-pin power connector, so this is quite a beefy card. And there seems to be some kind of a dip switch here. That's interesting. I know that it can be used for flashing the BIOS, but I don't know what else it's good for. Well, we'll figure that out later. Okay, moving around to the back of the card, we've got the same basic look here, so it's going to look quite sharp no matter what case you install it in. And then down at the bottom of the card we find nothing of note other than a PCI Express connector. Now, I love this. Shroud on the back of the card is like the best idea ever because I don't want to see, you know, what green or red or blue PCB you're using. You know what? Just a nice black shrouded heatsink. Functional, looks great, I approve of this message. And, oh, you can see that there's actually two-part construction to the shroud that goes on the front, so there's the plastic part. And then this part appears to actually be made of plastic. Can't tell. Metal? I'm pretty sure it's metal because I think that's part of the heatsink. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the bottom part's metal, so that's part of the heatsink that actually cools the VRM, RAM chips, all that other good stuff. All right, let's move around to the business end of the card, where we will find all of our connectivity options. Now, bear in mind you can't use all of these at the same time. So if you want to run three displays, that means you can run any two of the DVI or HDMI, and then at least one DisplayPort. If you want to run four displays, any two of these and two DisplayPort. So be aware of that. Multi-display, you will probably need to use DisplayPort at some point. We've got a half-open PCI slot for ventilation, so that explains why they needed the extra ventilation room here on the top of the card, so that you can exhaust. So basically, this is kind of, I'd consider this a half-and-half between external exhaust and internal exhaust. So, yeah, there's not really much else to say about that. Now, oh, this is interesting. Look at that. This card does not include a DVI to VGA adapter. So as per my recommendation, that if you're buying a high-end card, you should probably throw that VGA monitor away. Gigabyte seems to have taken that to heart, and they don't think you need a VGA adapter for this particular card, although I can tell you right now it will work if you use an adapter from DVI to VGA. So thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Radeon HD6970, and I'm just going to turn off the camera for a sec, find out what this DIP switch is for, and then I'll be back. So it's something to do with flashing the BIOS. That's pretty much all the details I have right now. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other awesome video content.