The Card

I know it's only a sticker, but Diamond have made the reference cooler look so sweet on this Radeon HD 7970. I wasn't the only one to notice it, when Cameron came over he also noticed how sweet the card looked in our testbed. While a lot of companies still only have reference coolers, a good looking sticker is one of the things that separate them at the moment.

Quickly jumping around the rest of the card we've got an 8-pin and 6-pin PCI Express power connector up the back while closer to the front we've got two CrossFire connectors and a Dual BIOS switch.

On the I/O front we've got a Dual-Link DVI connector, HDMI port and two mini DisplayPort connectors to round off that area of the card. You can also see the air vent across the top of the card that will help the air extract out of the back of the case.

Specifications

Like most HD 7970's we've seen at launch, the Diamond card we're looking at today uses the default clocks which as you can see below puts the core at 925MHz and the 3GB of GDDR5 at 5500MHz QDR.

What's really interesting, though, is the fact that the WHQL Catalyst 12.2 driver shows up as the 12.3. The 12.2 pre-certified driver also shows up as the 12.3 driver. If it wasn't for the fact that it said 12.2 when you clicked the .exe, you'd think this was the 12.3 driver. Who knows what's going on with that Catalyst team these days.