The Card

Like just about every other HD 7970 we've looked at we've got the reference design going on here which means there are no real big surprises. Taking a quick spin around the card finds an 8-pin PCIe and 6-pin PCIe power connector while closer to the front we've got the BIOS switch and two CrossFire connectors, which we'll be making use of today.

Moving over to the I/O side of things quickly we've again got nothing out of the ordinary with a Dual Link DVI connector, HDMI port and two Mini DP ports on the far left. The top half of the card is vented to help let the hot air escape, something we'll no doubt need the cards to do today as they heat up.

Specifications

Sitting in a neat row we have our four reference clocked cards which means on the core side of things we've got a 925MHz clock while the 3GB of GDDR5 memory carries with it a 5500MHz QDR clock. No surprise at all and exactly what we want to see as we look at the scaling performance today.

Before we move onto the testbed the last thing we want to check is that all our GPUs are enabled. Looking at the bottom in the ATI CrossFire tab you can indeed see that CrossFire is enabled and done so via four GPUs.