"The HIS 7970 X Turbo utilizes a custom "deluxe silver" PCB solution sporting a 18+1+1 phase power design using solid state choke capacitors and HIS’s IceQ X2 cooling system. It is configured with 3GB of DDR5 memory running at a 6GHz effective rate, and the GPU is clocked at 1120MHz and is set to boost to 1180MHz. Compared to the reference AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition clocks, this represents a 130MHz factory overclock. In game, the 1180MHz boost clock was observed as the effective clock at all times. The IceQ X2 cooling system is comprised of five heat pipes that carry heat away from the GPU to aluminum fins that are cooled by a pair of 89mm fans.
The card features the ability to support up to 6 monitors at one time, which will limit the DVI connection to single-link (a maximum 1920x1200 resolution), however, there is a button that enables dual-link DVI but mode will only allow 5 monitors to be supported at one time.
There are also a pair of LEDs mounted on the card that supply visual information about the GPU’s voltage and the fan’s current fan speed. We observed that the GPU voltage LED would immediately jump to red any time the card was under load at factory clocks, which rendered it rather useless as it continued to be red as we increased the clocks and voltage. The fan speed LED was novel to observe during testing, however, it could also be manipulated by manually adjusting the fan speed of the video card. While these are rather unique features, these did not live up to the expectation of usefulness that we got from the card’s literature."
