Introduction

I have had this Diamond video card floating around for a little bit now, but wanted to make sure when we got around to testing it that we did it in a way that stands out and makes it a bit more interesting than just running it at stock through our lineup of benchmarks.

Since we knew that the Catalyst 12.2 drivers weren't far away we figured it was a good chance to look at the driver in a bit more detail than just our typical Catalyst benchmark line up, so that's exactly what we'll be doing today as we see how the Diamond HD 7970 with the series' first WHQL driver goes against the original launch driver we used.

Of course there are a few things we need to do before we get into the performance side of things and we see exactly what's going on with the latest AMD driver. Since we haven't looked at the Diamond HD 7970, the first thing we need to do is take a closer look at the bundle to see exactly what's going on.

Once we've done that we'll move into looking at the video card itself before we check the specifications. Once that's done we'll quickly cover our testbed and some of the other cards we've got here, which will then lead us into our benchmarks. First, though, we need to look at the package, so let's check it out.

Package

Checking out the bundle of the Diamond video card we've got the normal paperwork and driver CD along with a mini catalog. We've got a Mini DP to DVI and HDMI to DVI cable included along with the standard CrossFire bridge.