PowerColor is designing a non-reference Radeon HD 7970 graphics card, complete with its own PCB and cooler designs. For the cooler, PowerColor is designing an updated version of its Vortex II Cooler featured on some of its older high-end graphics cards based on Radeon HD 6900 series GPUs. The cooler design is a typical aluminum-fin-stack heat sink, the heat is fed by four 8 mm thick nickel-plated copper heatpipes. Ventilation through two 80 mm fans will be handled, threaded the frames of these fans and can be rotated to adjust the distance between the fan and the heatsink will fit their air power.
PowerColor has a custom PCB design to go with it, only the prototype has no Tahiti GPU sits on it, but PowerColor at least a board design of its own at hand. The PCB draws power from two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, a CHIL-made controller handles voltage regulation. The VRM consists of a 9 +1 phase design with a few other different power domains. The reactors appear to be somewhat less expensive compared to the CPL made-which presented at AMD's reference PCB. IR DirectFETs be replaced by inexpensive yet durable DrMOS chips.
PCB features support for two EEPROM chips, which can be selected using a 2-way switch near the CrossFire connectors. Since the cooler is not exactly designed to push hot air out of the back of the case, PowerColor took the opportunity to add a second DVI connector, so now the layout of display output resembles those of the previous generation high-end Radeon, with two each of DVI and mini DisplayPort and an HDMI. There is no word on the tentative launch date of this card.
source: http://www.techpowerup.com/158591/PowerColor-HD-7970-Vortex-Graphics-Card-Pictured.html
