Radeon HD 5970

Not so long ago, AMD released the world's fastest single-chip video accelerator, but did not rest on this, and almost immediately introduced a video card based on two new generation chips. The fact is that until now the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 accelerator has in most cases turned out to be faster, so AMD's top single-processor video cards could not take the "royal throne" and get the title of absolute champion. A couple of months after the release of the Radeon HD 5870, AMD brings a real contender to the title of absolute king of 3D graphics onto the stage. Meet AMD Radeon HD 5970 - the latest dual-chip accelerator from the "red" camp, the hero of our today's review.

Even at the time of the announcement of the Radeon HD 5870, we knew that AMD was actively working on a formidable weapon called Hemlock, but nothing was known about the detailed, and most importantly, true characteristics of the new product.

In fact, the AMD Radeon HD 5970 is nothing more than a "glue" of a pair of rather powerful Cypress chips, although these chips, like the memory installed on the video card, operate at a lower frequency compared to the Radeon HD 5870. Apparently, such a decrease in frequencies is due to the manufacturer's desire to fit the power consumption of the Radeon HD 5970 into a thermal package of up to 300 watts.

Since the heart of the AMD Radeon HD 5970 is a pair of chips from the Evergreen family, the owners of this video card have access to the entire arsenal of the latest technologies - DirectX 11, ATI Eyefinity, CrossFireX, etc. According to AMD, the Radeon HD 5970 graphics card has a processing power of about 5 TFlops. Collaboration of two GPUs in CrossFireX mode is carried out by means of a 2nd generation PCI-Express 2.1 switching PLX bridge.

Ceramic capacitors are used in the power subsystem of the video card. Also, the video card is equipped with a monitoring system, and the Volterra regulators soldered on the board allow you to control the frequencies and voltages on the graphics cores and video memory.

Also worth noting is the intelligent frequency and voltage control system. In 2D mode, the frequency of the leading GPU, as well as video memory, noticeably decreases, and their supply voltage also decreases. The slave chip goes into sleep mode altogether. Thanks to this mechanism, the idle state of the Radeon HD 5970 consumes no more than 42 watts.

The board has a pair of Cypress XT GPUs. As mentioned above, the number of functional units of each of the GPUs included in the Radeon HD 5970 is exactly the same as that of the video chip on the Radeon HD 5870. True, their operating frequencies are noticeably reduced (850 MHz for the Radeon HD 5870, 725 MHz for Radeon HD 5970). The total amount of video memory installed on board the AMD Radeon HD 5970 is 2 GB. Chips are manufactured by Hynix, their marking is H5GQ1H24AFR-T2C-934A, and the nominal frequency is 5 GHz QDR. In fact, the operating frequency of the video memory on the Radeon HD 5970 is noticeably lower, and amounts to 4 GHz QDR, which, in fact, opens up scope for overclockers to be creative.

Specifications ATI Radeon HD 5970