According to a post over at Chiphell forums, it appears that some, if not all for that matter, AMD AIB partners got engineering sample of the upcoming Radeon HD 9970 graphics card.

Although the Radeon HD 9970 name is not carved in stone, most recent rumors and sources pointed out that AMD wants to skip the HD 8000 series branding and simply go with the HD 9000 series name. Some sources connect the HD 9000 naming scheme with the recently released enthusiast-class AMD FX-9000 series CPUs.

In case you missed earlier rumors and reports, the upcoming Radeon HD 9000 series is based on AMD's Volcanic Islands GPUs with a completely new architecture that will feature a higher amount of stream processors as well as some other enhancements. According to the previous leaks taken from Catalyst driver, the AMD Radeon HD 9970 should be based on the Hawaii XT GPU and should go directly against Nvidia's quite good GK110 GPU.

According to the post, the sample graphics card sent out to one of the AIBs feature a 12-layer PCB which is a bit higher than what we have see on the HD 7970 reference design. The post also notes that Sapphire already plans a total of seven different custom coolers for the HD 9770.

Recent rumors and reports points out to October 2013 or Q4 2013 ass the launch time frame for the new HD 9000 series graphics cards. Nvidia will most likely counter it with lower prices and even some new variations of Kepler GK110 and GK104 GPUs as according to reports, Maxwell based 20nm graphics architecture is currently scheduled for the first half of the next year.

Source: Wccftech.com.