Yesterday AMD officially unveiled its new range of high-end graphics cards with the HD7900 series. Based on a 28nm fabrication process, the AMD Southern Islands family of graphics cards will introduce the Graphics Core Next architecture.

The AMD HD7900 range will be the first graphics cards to adopt PCI-E 3.0, effectively doubling the theoretical data bandwidth. They will also be the first cards to support the latest DirectX 11.1 standard.

Today (10 January 2011) XFX has revealed some of its own custom editions of the HD 7970. While other cards revealed to date have been based on AMD’s reference design, XFX becomes the first manufacturer to get creative with in-house designs, tweaking cooling systems and clock speeds.

XFX HD 7970 Double Dissipation

The XFX R7970 Double Dissipation uses AMD’s reference PCB design but introduces its own factory overclocked speeds as well as a custom dual-fan cooling system. The cooler uses a large aluminium fin array in conjunction with heat pipes which transfer high temperatures away from the GPU and memory.

The XFX R7970 Double Dissipation comes in two flavours. The Black Edition comes clocked at 1,000MHz on the core and 1,425MHz (5.7GHz effectively) on the memory. The standard Double Dissipation card sticks to AMD’s reference clock speeds of 925 MHz on the core and 5.5 GHz on the memory.

XFX is also going to release a reference design “core” version of the HD7970. This card will pack 3GB of GDDR5 memory across a 384-bit wide memory interface.

We expect to see more non-reference designs of the HD7000 series emerge over coming weeks, as well as more details regarding local pricing – so watch this space.

For more on AMD’s new HD7000 range, check out our AMD HD 7900 technology overview.