Radeon HD 5970: The Undisputed Performance Champ
AMD announced the Radeon HD 5800 (Cypress) and HD 5700 (Juniper) series back in September and October, becoming the first to market with fully DirectX 11-compatible graphics cards. In order to push its advantage over NVIDIA, the company quickly moved on to launch the dual-GPU flagship accelerator – Radeon HD 5970 on November 18th, targeting the enthusiast sector.
Lots of online reviews indicate that Radeon HD 5870 performed great enough to show a big advantage over its NVIDIA counterpart GeForce GTX285, making us expect more anxiously what is “the fastest graphics card on the planet” bringing to the table.
Since the real performance of NVIDIA’s next-generation Fermi-based GPUs has yet to be seen, in this article we’re comparing the HD 5970 with NVIDIA’s current fastest dual-GPU graphics card – GeForce GTX295, and checking out if HD 5970 is capable of challenging the Radeon HD 5870 CrossFire. Of course we’ll also explore further regarding its temperature, power comsumption and overclocking potential.
Introduction
Radeon HD 5970 specs
Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 overview
Radeon HD 5970 taken apart
Radeon HD 5970 power supply design
Radeon HD 5970 heatsink
Benchmark platform & settings
Power Consumption Results: Better than expected
Temperature benchmark: rather hot
Overclocking ability: not much headroom
Radeon HD 5970 overclocking βissueβ
Radeon HD 5970 vs. GeForce GTX295
Radeon HD 5970 vs. HD5870 CrossFire
Radeon HD 5970 OC vs. Radeon HD 5870 CrossFire
Final thoughts
December 13th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
If only nvidia would release some fermi benchmarks before christmas…
December 14th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Those benchmarks gonna have a little effect on ATI sales, I assume.