The Card

Looking at the HIS HD 7970 X IceQ X2 Turbo we can see the new cooler design which is huge and is highlighted with those two 89mm fans and the giant X logo in the middle. We can see on the left side we've also got the IceQ X2 and X logo while the right side again lets us know that the card is a Turbo model.

Behind the two fans you can see a massive heatsink that goes from one end of the PCB to the other and actually shoots over the back by an extra couple of centimeters. Also present are a total of five heat pipes to help push heat away from the core itself. Hopefully outside of all this fancy naming we see some strong performance from the new IceQ X2 cooler.

Moving in a little closer you can see at the back HIS have opted for a dual 8-pin power connector setup instead of the normal 8-pin / 6-pin setup that we see on the reference HD 7970 GHz Edition. We saw Sapphire do the same thing and the change is meant to bring with it a cleaner line of power and more of it to help with overclocking. Staying across the top you can see two CrossFire connectors at the front in the event you want to run up to four of these bad boys together.

Finally we finish up with the I/O side of things which brings with it a little bit of an interesting setup. Looking above you can see we've got four Mini DP connectors and a HDMI port alongside the typical Dual-Link DVI connector. We've also got a button present which changes the setup.

To make use of all those connectors some of the display lanes have to be divided and the Dual-Link DVI has to become a Single-Link type. We actually saw MSI do this on the Lightning video card. The HIS setup is a lot nicer, though, thanks to the fact that if you have a Dual-Link DVI monitor and you don't have an expensive Active DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI convertor, you don't need to buy one in this case.

What HIS does is with a push of a button you can make it a Single-Link DVI connector with all our DP connectors available or a Dual-Link DVI connector with the loss of a MiniDP connector. It's a really smart setup and it's something we should see more companies do when they want to move to the heavy DisplayPort connector setups. As much as I love DisplayPort, some people simply need the Dual-Link DVI connector still and they shouldn't be forced to buy an expensive adapter when they're already buying an expensive video card. Very good move HIS!

Specifications

Out of the box the new HD 7970 GHz Edition carries a default clock speed of 1050MHz while the 3GB of GDDR5 come in at 6000MHz QDR. Out of the box the new HIS HD 7970 X IceQ X2 Turbo carries a core clock of 1180MHz while the 3GB of GDDR5 comes in at the same 6GHz QDR memory clock.

Looking above you can see that we managed to push the core up to a solid 1250MHz while we pushed the 3GB of GDDR5 went to 6600MHz QDR. This is a really strong overclock that should yield some excellent performance gains, so let's get into the testing side of things to see just what we can get.