The Radeon HD 7970 uses a new cooler, based on vapor chamber technology, which is similar to the technology used by heatpipes. AMD says you can’t remove the GPU cooler, because the performance won’t be the same after you put the video card back together. That is why we didn’t disassemble this video card. Figure 4 was provided by AMD. According to the manufacturer, the fan is also new, providing higher air flow at a lower speed.

click to enlarge
Figure 4: Video card cooler

The reviewed video card has two BIOS chips, selectable through a switch. This way you can select between the default configuration or an overclocked configuration, which you created and saved “permanently” to the second BIOS chip.

click to enlarge
Figure 5: BIOS switch

Before seeing the performance results, let’s recap the main features of this video card.