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Today we had planned to show you how the Radeon HD 5970 performs when overclocked. However the more we began to play with the Radeon HD 5970 the less likely that article seemed possible and instead we began to head in another direction, which lead us to this article “ATI Radeon HD 5970 Overclocking Problems”... Just last week AMD unleashed their first dual-GPU Radeon HD 5000 series graphics card, and we have to say it was the most exciting launch for us of the year, at least when discussing graphics cards. Known as the Radeon HD 5970, this new graphics card is essentially a pair of Radeon HD 5870’s sharing the same PCB.  However in order to meet certain specifications, AMD was forced to down clock the core and memory frequencies to match the Radeon HD 5850 rather than the 5870. This meant that while the core configurations of the GPU’s are the same as the Radeon HD 5870, they are operating at a lower frequency. This did hurt the performance of the Radeon HD 5970 and it meant that it performed more like a pair of Radeon HD 5850 Crossfire cards. That said, no one really cared, as a pair of Radeon HD 5850 graphics cards will cost the same amount as a single Radeon HD 5970. The Radeon HD 5970 proved to be the world’s fastest single graphics card, as it easily dispatched of the GeForce GTX 295. However despite being so fast already, many were fixated on the superior overclocking performance, squeezing even more performance from the dual-GPU power house. When launching the Radeon HD 5970 it was made very clear by AMD that this was an enthusiast product and as such overclocking was a huge focus for the product. Initially AMD told us overclocks of 1GHz were possible, though no one really seemed to achieve this. That said, we were able to push both cores from a modest 725MHz to an impressive 900MHz, where we did see quite incredible performance gains. However in order to reach this frequency we were forced to use a special voltage tool which was provided by AMD. This tool increased the voltage of both the core and memory to provide greater headroom. The side effect to this was increased heat, while the operating volume became unbearable. Having achieved a core frequency of 900MHz and a memory frequency of 5000MHz, we were expecting serious performance gains and in some games we got them. Having said that, not all games provided us with impressive or even note worthy gains, and we wanted to know why. It first appeared that the more demanding games were receiving the smallest gains, and to be honest we were expecting them to show the greatest. Furthermore, the longer we ran certain tests, the less impact the overclock had, and scores would slowly decrease. After further testing we think we have an answer as to why this was happening... |
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