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As far as we are concerned all expectations have been met with the Radeon HD 5970, and while we are happy with the performance displayed today, we feel there is more to come. Often we feel that too much emphasis is placed on the drivers when looking at new graphics cards, as we hear time and time again that performance will greatly improve as the drivers mature, which is not always the case. However, with the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970 we do strongly believe that as the drivers mature this product will become faster, possibly much faster. When compared to the Radeon HD 5870, which is essentially a single GPU version of the Radeon HD 5970 with a little overclocking, the new dual-GPU monster was on average 49% faster. Furthermore, out of the dozen games we tested with, the Radeon HD 5970 was found to be on average 45% faster than the GeForce GTX 295 and 70% faster than the Radeon HD 4870 X2. That is quite incredible really, and even in many worst case scenarios the Radeon HD 5970 out gunned the GeForce GTX 295 by around a 30% performance margin. Although the GeForce GTX 295 is almost a year old now it has ruled with an iron first, destroying the competition to become the world’s fastest single graphics card, until now of course. Interestingly, despite the huge leap in performance, the Radeon HD 5970 only consumed 8% more power than the GeForce GTX 295 when under full load, making it very efficient. Products such as a $600 US graphics card are clearly aimed at extreme end-users, and with that being the case, why not provide the end user with a feature they will want and use. That feature for the Radeon HD 5970 would be the voltage modifications that allowed us to increase the core frequency by almost 25% (per core), while we did manage to boost the memory frequency by 25%.  The beta drivers which we were forced to use, as the card lacks official support at the moment, did cause us more than a few problems, though we were able to work around most of them. The overclocking side of things seemed a bit half concocted and again created a few problems for us. Although we were able to reach a stable overclock of 900MHz, AMD claims that many cards that they have tested will operate at 1GHz using the voltage mod, so we are keen to revisit the Radeon HD 5970 in the near future. Unfortunately we had just 2 days with the card, leaving us with so much more that we want to test and try. Still, our overclock provided a 20% rise in score when testing with 3Dmark Vantage at 2560x1600, which was impressive. Then when testing with Company of Heroes Opposing Fronts we saw a 17% increase in performance generated by the overclock, while S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat provided us with an 18% gain. It seems clear already that boosting the performance of the Radeon HD 5970 by over 15% is a very real possibility. It is also important to keep in mind that with a length of 30cm, this graphics card is not going to be compatible with a wide range of computer cases. Therefore we suggest that those looking at purchasing this impressive graphics card make sure that their case can accommodate for the EATX (extended ATX) form factor, which measures 30.5cm wide, roughly the same dimension as the Radeon HD 5970.
Reviewed By Steven Walton |
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