Asus has launched the AMD Radeon HD 7970 in India, with its Asus HD7970 card – priced at Rs 38,000, excluding taxes, with a 3 year warranty. Based on the 28nm Tahiti GPU, and boasting of more than 4 billion transistors, the Asus HD7970 is coupled with 3GB of GDDR5 video memory, and a 384-bit bus interface.
If you remember, the new Tahiti GPU from AMD is not just built on a more efficient 28nm fabrication process, it features a new architecture entirely – Graphics Core Next – doing away with the Very Long Instruction Wordset (VLIW) technology. This means it does everything differently, with AMD looking like it has hit the right combination – doing certain types of tasks, like tessellation and thread level parallelism, much better.
Power consumption has dropped, but not as dramatically as expected from a process change. Features such as ZeroCore Power make up for it however, acting like previously-laptop-only graphics switching technology. You can check out more details about the AMD Radeon HD 7970 and GCN architecture in our previous coverage.
The Asus HD7970 is a PCI Express 3.0 card, and supports DX11 and OpenGL 4.2 standards. The card is not factory overclocked, with a stock core clock of 925MHz, and memory clock of 1375MHz (5.5GHz effective), with 2048 stream processors, 128 texture units, and 32ROPs. The Asus HD7970 has the following ports – 1 x native dual-link DVI-I, 1 x via mini DisplayPort to single link DVI (active) adapter, 1 x native HDMI output, and 2 x native mini DisplayPort.
Bundled accessories include an HDMI to DVI (passive) adapter, CrossFire bridge, mini DisplayPort to DVI (active) adapter, and a power cable. Bundled software include the regular ASUS utilities including GPU Tweak, and the graphics driver. The card is quite large, with dimensions of 10.9x 4.2×1.3 inch.