First seen at CeBIT, the custom designed monster by Sapphire was a bit of a mystery, now we get to take a look under the hood.
First seen at CeBIT, the custom designed monster by Sapphire was a bit of a mystery, now we get to take a look under the hood.
Featuring a staggering 6GB GDDR5 comprising of 24 memory chips, it is no wonder why Sapphire has made use of all PCB space available on both sides of the graphics card. This card is expected to be part of Sapphire’s TOXIC range which will come with a factory overclock and is cooled using Sapphire’s ‘Vapour-X’ vapour chamber technology. Powered by a strong 8+3 phase VRM consisting of solid state components and uses a ‘Very high end’ VRM controller. Power is supplied by 2x 8pin connectors.
Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 6GB TOXIC
Backplate to cool mounted components on this side of the PCB
On this side, the Sapphire logo lights up, as well as having 8 LEDs to indicate VRM usage
The rear I/O shows 2x DVI, HDMI and 2x mini DP
The vapour chamber plate cools the GPU and surrounding memory
On the PCB we see power delivery components cooled by heatsinks and a BIOS switch adjacent to the CrossfireX fingers
On the reverse side of the PCB we see an extra array of memory chips as well as more VRM cooling heatsinks
Overclocked to 1300GHz, we see a score of 12463 in 3DM11 performance preset
This graphics card will feature a 1150MHz core out the box with 1500MHz GDDR5 memory and comes with dual-BIOS. The Sapphire HD 7970 TOXIC was overclocked on stock cooler to 1300MHz/1900MHz (Core/mem) and in 3DMark 11 managed to score P12463 in the performance preset.
Source Via TPU
