AMD board partners may be working on custom HD 7970 X2

So you know the drill by now, graphics chipset giants, Nvidia and AMD design a reference card and then board partners, like Asus, MSI, etc. slap their stickers on them and call it a day. Sometimes, we’ll see an odd card or two that are completely custom-built, right from the PCB design to the cooling solution and at Computex 2012, we may catch a glimpse of one such card. So we know that AMD is preparing to unveil or at least demo their flagship card, the HD 7990 at the electronics expo, scheduled for next month, but we now hear that board partners could be working on a custom dual-GPU card of their own – dubbed the HD 7970 X2. It appears the ‘X2’ moniker will be making a comeback, the same way Nvidia revived the ‘Ti’ moniker.

Will we see it at Computex?

The rumoured card is said to pack in two full 28nm Tahiti cores, joined together by a PLX bridge chip. The specifications and design is completely up to the manufacturers, so we could be seeing cards clocked well above 1GHz as well. The HD 7970 X2 will go head on with Nvidia’s GTX 690, but it should be a lot more competitively priced. Meanwhile, AMD will be launching the HD 7990, so it looks like the board partners will also be carrying a HD 7990, along with the custom HD 7970 X2 (if it actually exists!). It will be interesting to see how the board partners price both these cards and how much of a performance difference there will be as well. AMD’s current HD 7900 series is hurting pretty badly in the market, ever since Nvidia sucker punched them with the GTX 670. The card breaks all the rules, delivering performance that even rivals their own GTX 680. I guess we’ll have to wait for Computex to find out, so stay tuned.