Maximum PC caught a nice photo leak this weekend for the new 7970 arriving soon. The card seems to have a solid rumor date of December 22nd for the official unveiling and a few key slides of the card and the changes have leaked out already to the public. Honestly I’m liking the design shift and hoping the new vapor chamber really helps bring the temps down, AMD has claimed in the past with Bulldozer they can get things to run ice-cold, if they can do the same on their high-end cards without a performance hit I’ll be happy.

Check out the gallery for some details.

The changes are many, over 2000 stream processors and 1GHz clock speed and above on the stock cooler. You have 3GB of onboard memory and AMD stepping out of the classic ring bus that served them well for a 384-bit bus to take the memory bandwidth through the roof. The whole thing will still run under 300W in single card mode which is a relief for a juggernaut in the next generation race.

We’ll have to wait until Thursday to see if the rumors of the announcement are true, makes me wish I didn’t just upgrade to a 6800 series this weekend though.

Anywaayy. The point is they have a short video of gameplay from the DX11 engine for DiRT 2 and it looks amazing. If we can link up a review of the game with the Logitech G27 you might lose me for a decade.

Enjoy

Update: It seems the guys at PC Per either had too much traffic or caught flack for posting this up without permission. The file is nuked on Vimeo and on their website as well. :/ if it comes back up I’ll repost it.

Update 2: It’s back online, hosted through Youtube