CeBIT 2012: PowerColor Radeon HD 7970 Vertex II Makes Its Appearance

Well known to overclockers and enthusiasts, PowerColor’s Vertex II product line will soon get a new member as the company is currently working on releasing a new Radeon HD 7970 graphics card that will use this advanced cooling solution.

The so called Radeon HD 7970 Vortex II was presented by PowerColor at this year’s CeBIT fair and, at a first look, it resembles last year’s Devil 13 HD 6970 quite a lot.

Both cards use two 92mm fans accompanied by four large copper heatpipes with an 8mm diameter to draw the heat away from the GPU and into a large aluminum heatsink.

In the case of the Vortex II this covers most of the graphics card’s PCB and is topped by a black, with some reddish accents, plastic shroud meant to direct the fan airflow downwards.

If we were to remove the whole cooling assembly, we would see that the card PCB was also redesigned by PowerColor to feature dual 8-pin PCIe power plugs and an 8-phase VRM.

According to TechPowerUp, this allows PowerColor to ship its card factory overclocked to 1100MHz, which is almost 20% more than AMD’s recommended clock speed.

No information regarding the release date or the pricing of PowerColor’s Radeon HD 7970 Vortex II was provided.

The AMD Radeon HD 7970 is based on the Tahiti XT core that includes 32 Compute Units for a total of 2048 stream processors, which are joined by 128 texture units, 32 ROP units and a 384-bit wide memory bus.

This is linked to 3GB of GDDR5 video buffer memory that runs at 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective), while the stock GPU frequency is set at 925MHz. 

AMD’s MSRP for the Radeon HD 7970 was established at $549.99 (433 EUR), but considering the custom cooler and PowerColor’s factory overclocking, we expect the Radeon HD 7970 Vortex II to carry a higher price tag.

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