Introduction

AMD's GHz Edition of the Radeon HD 7970 GPU was a bit of a funny launch due to the fact that AMD tend to want to have the product ready for market when it hits. Mind you, this hasn't been the pattern for the HD 7970, as when we saw the model launch originally in December, it also wasn't ready for the market.

Over the last week, though, we're starting to see the new GHz Edition model show up from manufacturers in a fairly big way. Saying that we're still yet to really see it hit the retail side. It seems that part of the delay is that companies are choosing to move away from the reference design and in quite a big way.

The first company to give us something was Sapphire in the form of the HD 7970 GHz Edition TOXIC 6GB. Today we've got another one that comes from HIS under the HD 7970 IceQ X2 Turbo naming scheme.

Sapphire did an excellent job of impressing us with their rendition of the HD 7970 GHz Edition, today we want to find out if HIS is able to do it as well. Like always, though, we've got to do a few things before we find out with the first being the package as we see just what HIS are offering us.

Once we've done that we'll move onto the video card itself and the specifications side of things in which we'll also be covering overclocking since that's clearly one of the best features with these new GHz Edition cards. We'll then get into the performance side of things before we finally wrap everything up.

Package

The first thing we notice is the new box design that HIS is offering which looks fantastic. The all black look is extremely sleek looking with the blue HIS text throughout. You can see we've got the new GHz Edition labeling on the box along with the Turbo name present and the new HD 7970 X tag which HIS is giving the GHz Edition card.

Turning the box over we get a run down on some more features including the X Elements side of things which helps with stronger overclocking while we also get an idea of the new Show and Tell technology that gives us an idea on what's going on with the card itself. We've also got a run down on the new IceQ X2 cooling technology that is present.

Inside the bundle you can see a lot of the regular inclusions with a driver CD, iTurbo CD, manual, sticker and some information on the Weight Lifter that HIS have been including for a while now. The big bonus here, though, is the inclusion of the DiRT Showdown voucher. It feels like ages since we've got any form of game in a bundle.

Along with all this, though, we've got a Mini DP to Single-Link DVI Adapter, HIS Weight Lifter, DVI to VGA connector and a CrossFire bridge.