Radeon HD 5970 Seen in All Its Might
AMD did make quite a splash by launching the first ever DirectX 11-ready Radeon HD 5800 series GPUs, and the Radeon HD 5870 has also helped the company to retrieve the performance crown of single-GPU graphics card by beating NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285. Apparently, the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970 is something which deserves even higher expectations.
Our fellow site Alienbabeltech has just posted the first pictures and benchmarks of Radeon HD 5970, but the performance screenshots have been cleared up a bit later, due to the pesky NDA, as you can expect.
Radeon HD 5970 features a very long PCB which measures 13.5 inch (i.e.34.29cm), making it to be the longest ever. The reviewer actually had some problems fitting it into a full-sized tower case like the Antec 1200. According to them, the fan worked at 4700RPM under load, not unexpectedly, too much noise as well.
October 31st, 2009 at 4:42 am
SWEET
October 31st, 2009 at 7:11 am
That card is f*cking huge, geez. It barely fits in an Antec 1200, which is no small case. I’m afraid that motherboards are going to get bent under the stress of such a huge and most likely, heavy card though.
One 8 pin connector (150W) and one 6 pin (75W) and the PCI-Express port which is another 75W, so a total of 300W? Sounds like they have lowered the clocks then to reduce power consumption. Didn’t really have a choice, to keep temperatures in check too.
In any case, looking forward to see the real benchmarks and the detailed reviews.
Any announced date for the launch of the Radeon 5970?
October 31st, 2009 at 8:36 am
Bent motherboards? Hmmm isn’t that’s what brackets on the video cards are made for…..
October 31st, 2009 at 10:27 am
This is a engineering sample video card and the final product is likely to be a inch or 2 shorter, likely at or near the size of the 5870. However, if this card is 8gb of gddr5 memory, I willing to except it at its current size. Though an inch less would be a good idea too.
October 31st, 2009 at 10:29 am
*has 8gb gddr5 ram i mean. lol
October 31st, 2009 at 11:59 am
WTF? No, it won’t have 8 freaking gigs of RAM. And if this were an engineering sample, why would they make a slick shroud for it? Dumbass.
October 31st, 2009 at 12:04 pm
This monstrosity could kill someone when used to bash someone’s head (“I’ll brick you to death!”) LoL! O well, good times are here again! ^_^
October 31st, 2009 at 4:50 pm
This… thing, needs digital pwm’s and other SoC components to save from pcb length. I wonder what is the max rpm on that little fan attached to one end? lol.
October 31st, 2009 at 9:09 pm
So ATI is in the space heater business now?
November 1st, 2009 at 8:32 am
@jason
How could you not sound anymore stupid?
cardname idle/load
Radeon HD 4890 172w/271w
Radeon HD 5870 130w/268w
Radeon HD 4870X2 191w/415w
GeForce GTX 275 134w/297w
GeForce GTX 285 134w/301w
GeForce GTX 295 176w/375w
the 5870X2 can easily come in under the GTX 295, and nvidia has only one card that Maxes out under 300w. Are you afraid that nvidia is going to lose marketshare to ATi in the space heater market?
-toast
November 1st, 2009 at 11:51 am
@’Jason is also a retard’
You’re a twat
November 2nd, 2009 at 2:45 am
Your all Fucking Cock Heads!
Nvidia FTW!!!
November 2nd, 2009 at 3:00 am
Good grief, I’ve never seen such bitterness here…
November 2nd, 2009 at 8:18 am
to the one who called me a moron and dumbass:
Each rv870 can control up to 4gb of GDDR5 memory, the nvidia gt380 can control up to 6gb of gddr5 memory per gpu. So 8GB of memory on the 5870×2/5970(no official release of the name yet) is not impossible. And a card that size in the pictures above coulc easily support at or over 8gb of GDDR5 ram. Also just because its sleek doesn’t mean its the final product, the gt300 board showed at the nvidia convention turned out to be just a fake or a egineering sample but looked sleek and cool. Same applies to the 2900xtx that was never released but there was a egineering sample that was shown. So before throwing out statements that you think are true, look up some research before you comment you blit.
November 2nd, 2009 at 8:26 am
Oh and also 2 5870s are faster than one geforce 295, though sometimes the 295 wins but this is do to it haveing more mature drivers and in some cases games that are made to run on nvidia videocards better than atis’. Like batman:arkum. And the 5870×2/5970 will have shader and memory advantage over the 295 (using nvidias count 640 stream shaders/4-8gb gddr5 ram for the 5870×2/5970 vs 480 and 1792 gddr3 ram for the 295).
November 2nd, 2009 at 9:45 am
I cant believe most of the false comments people are leaving here . Anyone reading most of these comments please do not believe them . They are false unknowlagable carbage at best !
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:04 am
Let us say that video card “ZYX” has 8 gigs of RAM and then let us also say that the system cardc “ZYX” is in has 8 gigs of RAM (do you follow so far?)
Now how much system memory would be available based on a video card with an equal amount of memory???
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Warnar, wtf are you smoking? Why in the holy name of fuck would ATI put 8 gigs of RAM on that board? There is no need for even 4GB yet. And if this were an engineering sample, why in the hell would they make these slick promo shots of it? If this were just an engineering sample that is much longer than the final version, why would they want to show it off? Come on, you are full of shit.
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:44 pm
@18: if its a test to show the capabilities of OPENCL or other shit ( example: THE FIREGL VERSION), maybe it would go up to 8.
theres cards with 2-3Gb of vram already in the pro market.
November 2nd, 2009 at 10:28 pm
@18: maybe, but this is obviously a gaming system.
November 5th, 2009 at 5:34 am
The 5870×2 will NOT have 8Gb of RAM. Fermi (workstation variant and original design) is scheduled for 6Gb. The desktop (graphics) version for us normal humans will be tailored down. Any tech site readings will confirm this.
And i agree with Rocky9mm, most of the posts here about what the card will do are just plain bullshit. There is no marketing sense anyway to release a 8Gb card for desktop graphics and that is what the 5870×2 is for. Throw in the 32 bit OS problem of system memory and the reasoning is blatantly obvious.
Also, to someone else’s point, dual 5850′s beat a GTX295 (Have a look at almost every tech website for reviews) so 5870 x2 will thrash GTX295. But, it will also consume more power unless it’s clocked downward. Two 5850′s consume about +5 to -40 watts than a GTX 295 (again, go read the myriad reviews people)so two 5870′s will consume more than a GTX295. And if they did put 8Gb or RAM (rofl) onboard, it’s be ridiculously hungry.
For the record I owned (still do own technically) a GTX295 and have replaced it with Crossfired 5850′s – faster, quieter, cooler and less power hungry. Unless Fermi kicks ass and is <£400, i’m staying with the red camp.
November 7th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
Wouldn’t it be better to have 2 x 5870 crossfired? I see no point in getting 5890, even if it is slightly cheaper than 2 x 5870 cards. The power savings is negligible and worse still, you’d end up with underclocked RV870s.
November 8th, 2009 at 4:56 am
There are some boards that do not have two graphics card slots but the users would still want the performance of two cards. Hence the 5970.
November 9th, 2009 at 9:56 am
i.e. for p55 only has 16x PCI-E lanes, that allow only a single x16 or two at x8/x8
November 10th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
That length worries me!
November 20th, 2009 at 6:06 am
Thats what she said ^^^
November 20th, 2009 at 6:06 am
@trinanjan
thats what she said when she seen mine
November 20th, 2009 at 6:07 am
then you woke up chris “whtennerdy”
November 27th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Looks like the 9800 Pro has finally been beat.
August 17th, 2011 at 9:06 pm
I recently came across your web site and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my very first comment. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this website very frequently.