Radeon HD 7970 Engineering Sample (A bit beat up, but alive!)

So this floated into work today, and quickly came home with me. I think it's freakin' cool.

 

That DP/HDMI dual port is a really cool concept, and I'm interested as to why they dropped it in the final output design.

 

It is pretty banged up and is missing quite a few small capacitors and a couple resistors. It does start, but the artifacting is insane. The memory is 3GB of Hynix GDDR5, and fails inversion testing with 5700+ errors, which makes me think either they were still working on memory arrangement, or a few of those missing capacitors played a role in the stability.

 

Here's the GPU-Z validation I could get from it.

http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/details.php?id=a2744

Here is the only screenshot I could get to show the artifacting, taken with my phone of course so not the greatest quality.

 

 

If the drivers are allowed to install, it never boots into Windows again. I don't know if this is because of the physical damage or the fact that the VBIOS was still a beta build. 

With the VBIOS switch on setting 1 it displays 1984 SPUs, 124 TMUs, and the full 32 ROPs as you can see. Switched to setting 2, it never shows POST but the screen activates to solid black.

 

Definitely going to look into fixing the parts that are missing, and seeing if I can't get it running as it should. I have a few other Engineering Sample cards that I can try to get a hold of (including an nVidia "G100 ES" oooh, mystery) but it's not a sure deal.

 

Cheers!

 

Damn, that's pretty cool.

That's neat. Shame it got beat up. Maybe if you've got some soldering skillz you could patch it up?

As for that dual HDMI/DisplayPort... port, perhaps they didn't make it because it's a fairly custom part. Jump on Digikey right now, and you can see any one of fifty DP socket, or one of two hundred HDMI sockets.