Sapphire Shows Us its Radeon HD 7970-based Vapor-X 6GB

This is the sort of card that would be thrown in triple and/or quad Crossfire rigs for huge resolution gaming. I don't think that there's any other practical way to utilize that much VRAM in gaming. This is definitely an aspect of gaming where the 7950 and 7970 would be far better than the GTX 670 and GTX 680 regardless of the game due to 7900's better performance relative to GTX 670/680 as the resolution and other settings are increased.

im pretty sure that the 7970 itself will bottleneck the 6gb of vram. if you throw this thing in a quad-crossfire array, you in theory get 24gb of vram

jimmysmittyHuh. I can tell you that the Vapor-X does keep them about 10c cooler than even normal Sapphire setups. Now I might have to get this and trade in my HD7970 for it. 6GB of VRAM would be pretty insane.....6GB of Vram to play Max Payne 3! :D

TheBigTrollim pretty sure that the 7970 itself will bottleneck the 6gb of vram. if you throw this thing in a quad-crossfire array, you in theory get 24gb of vram
You'd have 24GB of VRAM total, but each GPU can still only use its own VRAM. Graphics cards can't share data on a high enough bandwidth connection in order to share memory capacity between the GPUs and CF/SLI can't change that. They would need to be able to talk to either the other GPU or the other GPU's memory at an equal speed to their own and this is almost definitely not something that would work well in if tried.

Theoretically, AMD/Nvidia could do this on dual GPU cards where they could link the two GPUs to each other and/or to all of the memory on the card with very high bandwidth and minimal latency, but chances are that this would require a modified or completely new RAM interface and I think that it might need double the input/output ports to reduce the chance of a two GPUs fighting each other over RAM access. This would mean more complex and expensive RAM chips would be needed and the memory controllers might need to be modified. However, the card would not need each GPU to have its own huge reserve of memory, so it could be done cheaper if fewer of these chips were used than would be used by a more conventional dual GPU card today.

Regardless, GPUs on separate cards would need some sort of breakthrough to be able to share memory at high speed enough bandwidth and with acceptable latency. The latency might be an almost easy thing to do because GPUs don't seem to be the most latency limited devices, but the bandwidth problem doesn't seem like an easy thing to solve cheaply.

TheBigTrollim pretty sure that the 7970 itself will bottleneck the 6gb of vram. if you throw this thing in a quad-crossfire array, you in theory get 24gb of vram
The problem is that cards can't use each others VRAM because each card is producing their own frame. A quad-crossfire with four of 6 GB VRAM will still only be recognized as a 6 GB of VRAM, but paired with four 7970 GPUs.

Now if GPUs could use each others' VRAM, that would require significantly upgraded CF/SLI and memory bandwidth (GDDR 6 1024+ bit) to handle the data going between the cards.

The result? Any cost reductions from reduced VRAM would be overshadowed by the need of greater bandwidths.

Dont like these designs, the current box designs aim to shoot the hot air out of the case via the small exit where the connections are, this just blasts the heat out the sides and right into the case creating a vortex of heat inside your case. So if you have good case cooling, awesome, but if you don't this just heats up the interior of your case incredibly.