The Card

Checking out the card we can see that the color scheme is identical to that of the HD 7970 reference cooler. The biggest difference is we've got the fan not only in the middle, but also in a more traditional form instead of the centrifugal design we've seen from AMD and NVIDIA for a while now. This design should be a little quieter, we'll find out later, though, when it comes to the testing side of things.

Doing a quick spin around the card you're not seeing anything out of the ordinary compared to the XFX one when looking at the power with the same two 6-Pin PCIe power connectors present. Closer to the front we've got two CrossFire connectors along with the Dual BIOS switch. The latter item was lacking on the XFX card. If the Dual BIOS switch turns into being something that can give us the ability to flash to a HD 7970 BIOS, we're not sure yet. We'll no doubt find out in time if there's any real use to it.

The I/O side of things brings with it a Dual Link DVI connector, HDMI and two mini DisplayPort connectors while the top half is simply all vents. Due to the fan design the "Vents" shouldn't come into play as much, since the fan won't push all the air in one direction. Hopefully the cooler performs well, though.

Specifications

As we mentioned in the introduction we're dealing with a reference clocked card from HIS. Having a look below you can see that means our core comes in at 800MHz which is 100MHz lower than the overclocked XFX Black Edition card we looked at earlier.

Moving over to the memory side of things we've got 3GB of GDDR5 that carries a clock speed of 1250MHz or a nice rounding 5000MHz QDR. There's really not much more that needs to be said since we covered the main specification changes in our launch coverage using the XFX HD 7950 Black Edition Double Dissipation 3GB.