AMD HD 5970 reviewed and benchmarked

What do you do after you release the world’s fastest GPU and your competition has nothing to respond with? You put two of them on one card of course.
This is exactly what AMD has done with the HD 5970, and in doing so it has claimed the title of world’s fastest graphics card. The HD 5870 is already an outstanding product, and it will be a while before many games are going to be maxing it out. So why would anyone want two of them on one card? The truth is that nobody needs this much graphics processing power right now. But for those who want the best, the HD 5970 is answer.

On paper you can take pretty much all the HD 5870’s specs and double them.  The HD 5870 has 2.15 billion transistors; the HD 5970 has 4.3 billion. The HD 5870 has 32 ROPs; the HD 5970 has 64. The one area where the HD 5870 shows up its colossal counterpart is clock speeds. The HD 5970 gets a significant reduction on the core from 850MHz to 725MHz, and the 2GB GDDR5 memory gets dropped from 1200MHz to 1000MHz. Despite this, there is no denying that the HD 5970 is a beast, and is indeed the kind of card that will have one doubting their CPU’s ability to keep up.

Power consumption

Despite its raw horsepower, the HD 5970 maintains impressively low idle power consumption, needing only 42W when not performing intensive tasks.

Under load the card will use up to 296W, meaning a decent power supply is in order. A full sized case will also be needed, as the HD 5970 is a gigantic piece of hardware, virtually dwarfing the already massive HD 5870.

Unlike the HD 5870 which uses two 6-pin power headers, the HD 5970 makes use of a 6-pin and an 8-pin, a standard which most brand name 700W+ PSU’s will support.

Overclocking

Although the HD 5970 is conservatively clocked at 725MHz, AMD themselves encourage enthusiasts to experiment (safely) and get the best out of their particular card. Because all GPU’s will have their own unique overclocking window, it is difficult to say with certainty that any (or even most) HD 5970s will clock to 850MHz and beyond. Having said that, we quite easily got our test unit to 900MHz without any serious tinkering.

Benchmarks

Test Rig

CPU AMD Phenom II 955 Black Edition @3.8GHz

Motherboard Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P

RAM 4x2GB Mushkin DDR3 1600MHz

We ran all our benchmarks at 1920×1200. If you do not have a monitor that supports this or higher resolution then it is very difficult to recommend the HD 5970 as it is a card intended for high resolution gaming. All benchmarks were performed using default clock speeds.

As expected, the HD 5970 has stolen the performance crown from Nvidia’s aging behemoth; the GTX 295. It beats Nvidia’s flagship performance king comfortably, with our benchmarks indicating a performance advantage of around 20% on average.
Pricing and availability

What makes the HD 5970 a card worth considering is that it can be had for around R6500. While this is a lot for a graphics card, we have seen top of the range products like this go for far more. It may be expensive, but the value is surprisingly good considering that the lowest price on a HD 5870 is around R4100. Two HD 5870s would therefore cost over R8000, and the aging GTX 295 costs in the region of R5200. While the GTX 295 is still an excellent performer, it is outdone by the HD 5970 in terms of performance as well as features (DX11, Shader Model 5, Tessellation, Eyefinity) making AMD’s new card a better high end product.

As is expected of such a niche product, stock is limited, but we were able to find a few etailers carrying stock including Prophecy.co.za.

More budget wary gamers will be better served looking at the HD5870 and below, but it is pleasing to know that AMD now has an uncontested high-end product truly worthy of any top of the range gaming PC.

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