AMD HD 7970 ‘Tahiti’ specs and launch date revealed

In a quite surprising turn of events, it seems that AMD will be pulling the launch date of its next-gen graphics card from January 9 to December 22, 2011. This gives AMD a slight edge over Nvidia, as it will certainly tempt all those itching to upgrade, to take the plunge. It also gives their board partners the ability to show off their creations at CES, next month. This will however be a paper launch, but at least we’ll be able to see the cards performance before its actual retail launch, which should be on January 9.

To 1GHz and beyond!

If this wasn’t good news, then here’s something better. German site , DonanimHaber have managed to get their hands on some leaked slides from the AMD PR team, which show the reference card design and the specifications. The card looks similar to their previous offerings,e except for the slightly redesigned cover for the heatsink. It is a dual-slot card out of which the entire top slot is dedicated to venting hot air from the card. Below, we see a DVI, HDMI and something called Active mDP ports. AMD has stuck with their blower styled fan and a BIOS switch makes a comeback as well. They’ll also be using a vapour chamber for the cooling system. Thanks to this, AMD claim the card can easily hit 1GHz and beyond, which is quite something.

Shaping up well

Now, coming down to the raw specs of the HD 7970, it will ship with a stock core speed of 925MHz and feature a crazy 3GB of GDDR5 memory. It also has a 384-bit memory bus and will be powered by a 6-pin and 8-pin power connector. While the peak power draw is a whopping 300W, the fascinating part is the idle power draw, which is said to be just 3W. Well, we just have a few days until AMD officially unveils it, so let’s wait and watch.