The card looks good as soon as you pull it out of the package, it isn’t over whelming in size and the cooler seems to be an improved version of the previous HD 2900 XT type. Card length comes in the same as the HD 2900 XT but the cooler is slightly smaller, you can see the memory sinks across the top of the card.
Having a look around the card the first thing we notice is that we move back to a single PCI Express connector, which is great news. The 8-pin connector was really annoying, a lot of power supplies don’t offer it and without it you lost ATI Overdrive functionality.
Across the top of the card we have the same Crossfire bridge that was found on the last generation of HD 2K cards.
Moving to the I/O department we can see that the card is dual slot which again is pretty normal for high-end cards. It’s good to see that AMD decided to go down this route instead of doing what NVIDIA did with the GeForce 8800GT and making a single slot cooler with a small fan that absolute screams along and doesn’t cool all that well.
There are also of course our two DVI connectors of which both support Dual Link connectivity and a TV-Out port if your TV doesn’t support HDMI which can be used with the help of the included adapter.
New Features
The card isn’t the beast that we thought it would be. While it carries with it a next generation naming scheme and some fancy new features it seems to be more half step like the 8800GT was for NVIDIA.
The particular core name is the RV670 and carries with it new 55nm architecture, what this give us is a smaller, cooler and hopefully faster core. It runs at 777MHz comes with 320 steam processors.
The Samsung GDDR-4 memory comes clocked in at 2252MHz DDR and uses a 256-bit interface. The card is of course PCIE 2.0 like we mentioned and there will supposedly be support for Quad Crossfire on the RD970 chipset when it is launched along with the Phenom later this year.
Other new features include DX10.1 support, Shader Model 4.1 is also supported and like NVIDIA, AMD have chosen to include their hardware decoding feature which in this case is UVD or Unified Video Decoder.
