We had an inkling HD 7970 X2 graphics cards would make an appearance at next week's Computex trade show, but PowerColor clearly couldn't contain its excitement and has let the cat out of the bag a little earlier than anticipated.
The manufacturer of all things Radeon has confirmed that it will be using the hot-and-humid Taipei exhibition halls to officially unveil the Devil 13 HD 7970 X2 - a card that we're told has been co-developed by AMD and PowerColor. Whether other AMD partners will have similar offerings remains to be seen, but PowerColor's card is a real beast. Teased in the pictures below, it features two HD 7970 'Tahiti' GPUs and a shared 6GB frame buffer.
Clock speeds are yet to be confirmed - as is price - but you don't need us to tell you that this one-card CrossFire sorcery will be crazy-fast and ultra-expensive. PowerColor isn't going into too much detail just yet, but the three eight-pin power connectors suggest that this Devil 13 card will be thirstier than most and that extra power is likely to go hand-in-hand with the red button sitting menacingly on the I/O panel - which, seeing as it's a button and that it's red, is likely to boost frequencies for one-touch overclocking.
Keeping all this extreme gaming paraphernalia calm and collected is a third-generation tri-fan cooler dubbed the Vortex III. PowerColor reckons the cooler delivers 'silent performance' in 2D mode, but it is a chunky unit and will it occupy three whole expansion slots. It's a nutter alright, but perhaps this is what it takes to dethrone NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 690?
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