Radeon HD 5970: The Undisputed Performance Champ
Radeon HD 5970 Taken Apart
front side of the PCB
rear side of the PCB
The HD 5970 manages to cram two GPUs onto one PCB which is 29.4cm long, and uses the PCI-E Switch chip to connect them.
The PCI-E Switch chip between those two GPUs
Different from the PEX8647-AB50BC F chip found on Radeon HD 4870 X2, HD 5970 has employed PEX8647-BB50BC F which offers 48 PCI Express Gen 2 lanes and 3×16 ports. AMD claims the new switch is compliant with PCI-E 2.1, but the PLX’s document shows us it just supports PCI-E rev 2.0.
The bandwidth between GPUs on HD 4870 X2 was boosted by taking advantage of SidePort technology.
Actually, SidePort function is disabled on retail products, but the users who managed to enable it had found that SidePort hardly brings performance improvement while adding the power consumption a lot, considering which, AMD has decided this feature is unnecessary for achieving good performance scaling on multi-GPU boards. Maybe when the multi-GPU technologies used by customer-oriented solutions change radically and extremely high-bandwidth is required for interconnection between the chips, SidePort will be back. However, not with the ATI Radeon HD 5800/5900 series.
One of the two GPUs of Radeon HD 5970
The two Cypress GPUs are built on 40nm fabrication process, each of which packing 2.15 billion transistors, 1600 stream processing units, 80 texture units, and 32 ROP units.
Hynix H5GQ1H24AFR T2C GDDR5 SDRAM
The Hynix H5GQ1H24AFR T2C works at a standard voltage of 1.5V, delivering maximum clock speed of 2.25GHz and data transfer rate of 4.5GHz. Since the card sports 4GHz memory clock, some overclocking headroom is offered.
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 “issue”
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.
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