ATI Radeon HD 5970 Dual GPU
December 7, 2009 by awang
The dual GPU powered ATI Radeon HD 5970 was not the best kept secret, but many gamers have been awaiting its arrival to see how it will shake things up. Designed to support the most demanding PC games at ultra-high resolutions and image quality settings, the ATI Radeon HD 5970 also has unlocked overclocking potential, granting access to every bit of power the card has to offer through ATI Overdrive. Will this be enough to take the title of the world’s fastest video card away from NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 295? Let’s find out!.
ATI revealed its last generation Radeon 5000 graphics family last September, when we got the chance to review the ATI Radeon HD 5870, and what a treat that was. In a few tests the single GPU Radeon HD 5870 was able to outgun the mighty GeForce GTX 295, while in most it managed to match or improve upon the Radeon HD 4870 X2. As you are likely aware, both of these products carry dual GPUs, which bring a number of implications, not to mention bigger price tags.
Radeon HD 5770, HD 5850, HD 5870, and HD 5970
Looking forward we knew Nvidia would have no immediate response to the new Radeons, while on the other hand ATI was not done unleashing its full series of products. Subsequently we looked at two more products that were meant to underperform the flagship HD 5870: the slightly cut down Radeon HD 5850 and the mainstream aimed HD 5770.
AMD’s "Sweet Spot" GPU strategy over the last few years has been fairly predictable. Instead of producing the biggest, most powerful GPU possible yields be damned the company sets out to produce a relatively high end GPU, using a cutting edge fabrication process, that hits a proverbial sweet spot between cost and performance. Then derivatives, and even multiples, of that GPU are used to flesh out a top-to-bottom line-up of graphics cards, that hit a broad range of price points.
It began with the RV670, which powered the single-GPU based Radeon HD 3870 and dual-GPU Radeon HD 3870 X2 hence the X2. Then came the RV770, which powered the Radeon HD 4870 and eventually the Radeon HD 4870 X2. The strategy has obviously paid off, as AMD is once again a price/performance leader in the GPU space, after some not-so-great performances like the R600, better known as the Radeon HD 2900 XT. Knowing their strategy, it should almost come as no surprise that the graphics card we’ll be showing you today, the Radeon HD 5970, has come to fruition. Although it doesn’t follow the same naming convention as AMD’s previous dual-GPU powered cards, the Radeon HD 5970 is nonetheless powered by a pair of ATI "Cypress" Radeon HD 5800 series GPUs, linked together on a single PCB by a PCI Express bridge, very much like previous X2 iterations.
Considering the fact that the Radeon HD 5870 is undeniably the fastest single-GPU powered graphics card currently on the market, this dual-GPU powered Radeon HD 5970 should offer performance that completely outclasses any other single graphics card on the market currently. In addition to killer performance, the Radeon HD 5970 also boasts all of the same features of the Radeon HD 5800 series, like full DirectX 11 support, ATI Eyefinity support, top-notch image quality and power efficiency.
ATI Radeon HD 5970 Architecture Specification
The ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics card is fairly simple and ATI included just one slide about the card’s architecture to get the point across. It takes a pair of Evergreen GPUs that are used on the Radeon HD 5870 graphics card, downclocks them and then pairs them together with a PLX PCI Express bridge to enable full-time CrossFire on a single high performance graphics card. The end result is a single card solution that has 3200 stream processors that are able to deliver almost 5 TFLOPs of Compute power! This makes the new ‘Hemlock’ card the most powerful graphics card in existence.
ATI Radeon HD 5850, 5870, 5970 Specification
As you can see above, the Radeon HD 5970 offers roughly double the performance of a Radeon HD 5850. What you’ll notice, however, is that that 5970 is somewhat of a mix between the 5850 and 5870. All of the stream processors (1600) in each GPU are enabled in the Radeon HD 5970, hence it has double the total number of the Radeon HD 5870 (3200). The Radeon HD 5970’s clock speeds, however, are in-line with the Radeon HD 5850. We’re told it’s the mixing of 5800 series specifications that resulted in the new naming convention for the Radeon HD 5970–it’s not quite a 5850 X2 or a 5870 X2, so in an attempt to avoid confusion, AMD gave the card a name that should convey the message that the 5970 is the highest performer of the three.
The Radeon HD 5970 sports a GPU clock of 725MHz with a memory clock speed of 1 GHz (4Gbps effective). According to AMD, maximum board power is 294 Watts, up slightly from the previous generation dual-GPU powered 4870 X2, but idle board power is only 42 Watts. The low idle power comes by way of aggressive clock gating and voltage reductions when the card is not under a significant workload. Due to the relatively high peak power though, 6-pin and 8-pin supplemental power connectors are required.
With its GPUs, the Radeon HD 5970 offers roughly double the performance of a Radeon HD 5850, save for its peak fillrate which is somewhat higher. Max memory bandwidth from the card’s 2GB of GDDR5 memory is 256GB/s, but keep in mind that’s 128GB/s per GPU.
The 5970’s maximum board power is rated for 294W, which somewhat explains why the 5970’s clocks aren’t higher. Had AMD pushed those stock frequencies any higher, max board power would be well north of 300 watts, which could post a problem to potential upgraders with power supplies that aren’t up to snuff.
For Further Details Look at This Video.. 
Image Galery of ATI Radeon HD 5970 Dual GPU
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