Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition reaches e-tail

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102997

And it's already out of stock.  Presumably there are more to come.

The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition sure didn't work out the way AMD intended.  The idea is that when AMD bins their Tahiti GPU chips, they siphon off the very best ones for use as a Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition GPU, and charges more for those chips than for ordinary Radeon HD 7970 cards.  They apparently expected that board partners would buy the new top bin chips, put them into existing card designs, and get them to retail quickly.

But Sapphire, Asus, MSI, and the rest of the board partners had other ideas.  They apparently looked at what AMD was doing and thought, hey, we bin out the best chips that AMD sells us for our premium, flagship cards.  Now AMD is siphoning off the chips that would previously have gone into those flagship cards and calling them a 7970 GHz Edition chip.  So let's just use those GPU chips in our top of the line cards, and not waste them on cheaper designs.

When AMD sent out Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition cards to the media for reviews, it was a simple reference card clocked higher.  That meant that the cooler couldn't handle the card without getting unduly loud.  Most reviews complained about the noise.  AMD said it was only meant to demonstrate performance in the final cards, not to be representative of cards that would actually be for sale.  So fortunately, the 7970 GHz Edition cards that you can actually buy shouldn't have those noise problems.

And now that Sapphire has shown their 7970 GHz Edition Toxic, we'll see what Tahiti can really do.  The card comes with two 8-pin PCI-E power connectors, so it could theoretically deliver 375 W safely to the card.  Surely the choice of two 8-pin connectors rather than a 6-pin and an 8-pin means Sapphire intends for the card to draw over 300 W in some cases.  The normal clock speeds are 1.1 GHz core and 1.5 GHz memory.  But the card comes with two BIOSes, and the second BIOS is clocked at 1.2 GHz core and 1.6 GHz memory.  For comparison, a stock 7970 is 925 MHz core and 1.375 GHz memory, so that's a huge overclock.

The card also sports a massive 6 GB of video memory, which is extreme overkill for most cases.  Of course, the card wasn't meant for most cases.  If you're looking to set up a 5-monitor Eyefinity system or three 2560x1600 monitors in Eyefinity, then this is the card you want, or perhaps others like it that should soon arrive from other vendors.  Otherwise, look at the $700 price tag and move along.  You can get a perfectly good Radeon HD 7970 for only 3/5 of that price.

On the other hand, there has only previously been one video card that could provide 6 GB of video memory to a single GPU.  And look at the price tag on that one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133347

Entirely different target market, but still.