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As exciting as it was getting to test the Radeon HD 5970 under NDA, it was also a major headache. With just two days to test the Radeon HD 5970, we could not have run into more problems. First the beta version of the Catalyst drivers were playing up, and although our test system could have been at fault here, it did create quite a long delay. Then finally we began testing the Radeon HD 5970, and while the numbers were truly impressive, given the specifications we were expecting more. However given how time sensitive the review was, we had to go with the results, and as it turns out they were accurate. Wrapping up the review we decided to include some preliminary overclocking results, and this is where we ran into even more problems. First of all the core overclock of 1GHz that we were told about was just not possible. Having arrived at a stable 900MHz overclock we found the results to be very erratic, with some games providing impressive performance gains while others showed almost no gains. At the time we had no idea what the issue was, and after confronting AMD with the overclocking issues they said it was likely down to an issue with the beta drivers. Given all the problems the beta drivers had given us we tended to agree with that analysis. However once the Radeon HD 5970 was launched we had one more day to play with it and we spent all that time frantically working on the overclocking issues. Before long we spotted the throttling issue, but failed to find a way around it. Having messed around with various frequencies, we were shocked to find that the default specifications would eventually result in throttling when both cores were taxed. In fact, we found that unless the cores were both locked at 650MHz, the cores would eventually throttle down to 550MHz. Clearly Radeon HD 5970 overclocking is not all it’s cracked up to be, and while these problems could be restricted to the card we looked at, it does seem unlikely. Surprisingly, we have not heard any other reports of the Radeon HD 5970 throttling issues, but then having said that, most that were lucky enough to get their hands on a sample were likely forced to shuffle it off quickly, before a second round of testing could be conducted. Keeping all this in mind, there is still no doubt that the Radeon HD 5970 is the world’s fastest single graphics card. However we are now questioning if it is really a better option at $600, opposed to a pair of Radeon HD 5850 graphics cards in Crossfire. On paper it is certainly a much more impressive product, but with the power and thermal issues that we ran into, we are not sure that it is as practical. Reviewed By Steven Walton |
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