Introduction

It unusual for us to miss an NDA, especially when we've got the sample on hand. The simple fact is that AMD chose to Grinch out on us and ignore the holiday spirit, a time when we tend to be able to relax for a few weeks before the CES run of products start to show up. With not only a 10 day holiday planned, but a decision to move from Perth, Australia to Taiwan just three months ago all in the works, the HD 7970 NDA was just one that wasn't going to be met, even though, our sample was sitting safely in Taiwan waiting for my arrival.

With a couple of samples built up over the last few weeks, the HD 7970 was straight on top and today we'll be finally checking out what the new model is all about. Unfortunately it wasn't just a matter of testing the HD 7970 and we could get on our way, along with that we tested a couple of other cards with the most recent drivers to see just what's going on with this new single GPU card from AMD.

Normally we'd move from here into the package of the card, but we're dealing with just a reference card here from AMD which means we of course don't have a bundle to look at, instead we'll be moving straight into the card and check out the main specifications of the new card from AMD.

Once we've done that we'll move into our testbed to see what's going on while we also take a look at the cards we'll be including in our graphs today. Then we get into the fun stuff and see what kind of performance the new single GPU card from AMD can put out before we wrap everything up. So with that all said and done let's check out the new card from AMD.