As Fudo predicted, the R700 is indeed black; and Chiphell has scored a couple of paparazzi shots of the card in the nude and there are some interesting details that can be seen in the pictures. First of all, AMD still hasn't finished the work on its in-house PCIe switch, and as such is still using a PLX solution.

This will most likely be a newer version than that on the Radeon HD 3870 X2, but we can't say for sure, as the model codes have been blurred, although the chip is physically smaller than the one found on the older card.

The card is also using digital PWM, a pair of them to be more exact, one for each of the GPUs. The advantage of this is that the digital PWMs take up a lot less PCB space than the analog PWM design of the Radeon HD 3870 X2.

It also appears as if the card is using 512MB per GPU in an eight chip per GPU configuration. This might cause some layout issues when AMD wants to launch a card with 1GB per GPU, but by then, higher density memory chips will hopefully be available.

The power connectors aren't angled on this card, but that might yet change before the final production cards arrive, and the card uses one six-pin and one eight-pin power connector. This reference card also has a pair of DVI connectors and a TV-out connector, but HDMI or DisplayPort doesn't seem to have been considered as a design option.

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