Report: AMD Radeon HD 5970
by Damien Triolet
Published on January 19, 2010
Specifications
The Radeon HD 5970 is made up of 2 Cypress GPUs with exactly the same configuration as is used on the Radeon HD 5870 but with the clocks of the Radeon HD 5850. Overall processing power amounts to an impressive 4.5 Tflops!
Radeon HD 5970
For this test, AMD supplied us with a stock Radeon HD 5970:
The Radeon HD 5970 has 2 DVI Dual-Link outs and a DisplayPort. It uses the same design as the other Radeon HD 5000s along with a rear casing. Unfortunately, aesthetics have carried the day over practicality, with the the card casing hanging 15 mm over the back, which lengthens what is already an enormous PCB (295 mm). In all the card extends 310 mm from front to back, quite a length to fit into your computer casing. Of course it'll be too big for many. We had to get the Black & Decker out to make space in the Sonata 3 casing that we use for heat and noise level tests.
Announced with a TDP of 294 watts, the Radeon HD 5970 is powered via two PCI Express connectors (6 + 8 pin) and is equipped with a large dissipator that rests on a large evaporation chamber like on Vapor-X and Sapphire cooling systems. AMD says that the card has been designed for overclocking and that the dissipator can handle up to 400 watts!
The GDDR5 memory is from Hynix and is certified at 1250 MHz, or 2500 MHz for data at speeds of 5 Gbps.
The Radeon HD 5970 uses a PCI Express PLX PEX8647 switch, as did the Radeon HD 4870 X2. Note however that PLX seems to be using an Apple iPod style custom engraving!
