HIS Radeon HD 7970 6GB IceQ X2 (Dual GPU) Video Card Review

The Card

Having a look at the card you can tell we're dealing with quite a big one by the amount of length that ends after the PCIe x16 slot at the bottom. You can see we've got two big fans on the card and behind that we're got a huge pair of heatsinks along with a whole bunch of copper that can be seen. The overall shroud design isn't anything too new as we've seen it with other cards that fall under the new IceQ X2 name.

Moving to the top of the card we can see the huge amount of power that is required to get the card up and running. In this case it's three 8-pin PCIe power connectors. You also get a better look at the thickness of the card here.

Moving to the back quickly before continuing across the top we can see what's going on with the heatsink. You can see looking through the back of the card we're dealing with some massive heatsinks and some massive copper pipes are coming out. It will be interesting to see how well the cooler performs with those two GPUs sitting on the PCB.

Moving closer to the front of the card you can see we've got a single CrossFire connector here instead of the normal two that you'd see on a HD 7900 series based card. This is of course due to the fact that the maximum number of cores we can have is only four and being a dual GPU card means that we can only have a maximum of two of these video cards installed.

Looking at the I/O side of things we get an idea as to just how big the card is thanks to that massive triple slot setup. We also see behind the grills on the top half of the card the massive heatsink setup again. When it comes to the connectivity side of things we've got a DVI Port along with a HDMI port and four Mini DisplayPort connectors.

Specifications

Having a look below we can see the clock speeds which sees both cores come in at 1050MHz. This is the same speed that we see on the new GHz Edition HD 7970's when boost kicks in. This is of course stronger than the original HD 7970 clock which came in at a lower 925MHz and Boost was not an option.

As for the massive 6GB of GDDR5 memory that comes in at 6000MHz QDR which is again the same speed as the GHz Edition HD 7970 and 500MHz QDR quicker than the original HD 7970.