AMD to launch HD 7970 before Christmas

In a move that is very surprising to many AMD has pushed forward the launch date of the HD 7970 to December the 22nd from the 9th of January 2012. The HD 7970 is the highest performance single GPU card AMD will produce on the HD 7000 series generation and a 2011 launch would certainly be a big marketing win for the AMD team. Although it will only be a ‘paper-launch’  or in other words only reviewers will get their hands on samples and be able to publish reviews, customers won’t be able to get stock till the previous launch date of January the 9th.

The earlier date means add in board partners such as ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI can show off their custom designs of the HD 7970 at CES 2012. The HD 7950 still retains the same January the 9th launch date. Although all specifications and reviews will be available now 2 weeks before stock is meaning that customers have plenty of time to make an educated decision about whether the HD 7970 is the card for them especially when the speculated price tag is around £450/€500 which is more than a GTX 580.

Source: VR-Zone