ATI 5970: Nvidia Nuked With The Specs Of ATI Radeon HD 5970

Graphics Cards | nawed | November 18, 2009 at 2:02 pm

ati-radeon-hd-5970

A sad day for Nvidia fanboys as today ATI has finished the competition with the launch of its most powerful graphics card yet, the Radeon HD 5970. ATI has priced HD 5970 reasonably at $599 and like AMD’s previous high-end cards, it uses two graphics chips housed on a single board and has an internal CrossFire interface to get the ultimate in performance.

XFX will offer this ATI Radeon HD 5970 in standard as well as Black Edition. Packing 2GB GDDR5 memory this graphics powerhouse will require ample space in your cabinet.

The main features of ATI Radeon HD 5970 includes:

Two 40-nm GPU running at 725 MHz
2 GB GDDR5 accessed at 4 GHz QDR (1 GHz real) thru two 256-bit interfaces (512-bit)
3,200 processors
two DVI and one mini DisplayPort outputs
a maximum TDP of 284 W and supports DirectX 11
CrossFireX and ATI Eyefinity technologies

The CPUs used aren’t different than what you would find solo in a HD 5870 however ATI has said that they cherry-picked them, to find the chips that had better upper-end performance. The HD 5970 has a vapor chamber design cooler one which uses water vapors to help move heat off of the GPUs.

ATI has seemingly clocked the HD 5970 lower than it can handle for two reasons, one more marketing-inclined than the other: the first is that this lower power consumption — which is good to see, as you don’t need anywhere near the full force of this card to handle your daily desktop activities; second, ATI is really pushing the overclocking potential of this card. So, by the lowering the default clocks, you make the upper-echelon overclocks seem more impressive.