There you are, the Radeon HD 5970. This dual-GPU graphics accelerator has proven itself to be a real monstrosity in terms of its performance, and is the fastest money can buy...if available in your friendly neighbourhood hardware store. Being the fifth dual-GPU flagship accelerator since DirectX 10, the Radeon HD 5970 asserts that dual-GPU cards are here to stay, and however much a company would prefer making monolithic single-GPU designs, at some point, it will find the need to release a dual-GPU flagship accelerator to maintain competitiveness in the high-end segment.
Like its immediate ancestors, the Radeon HD 5970 comes with pros and cons in an almost stereotypical fashion. Temperatures, fan-noise, and power draw are traded off for unassailable performance. There is no game that the HD 5970 can't run, at any resolution, at any level of detail, while keeping things playable. With strong shader compute resources and an improved anti-aliasing feature-set at its disposal, level of detail is never compromised on the HD 5970. The only places where it didn't feel the rush was with some of the older games, which ended up being CPU-limited. The HD 5970 is made for high-resolutions, far beyond 1080p.

To keep so much silicon operationally cool, AMD returned to its workhorse dual-slot cooler design. It now makes use of a unified base-plate and a single, large heatsink. When loaded, the cooler is loud, but then again, that was expected of the cooler. The temperatures and power draws are a slightly different issue. The transition to the 40 nm process seems to have helped AMD's case a great deal. While the card idles below 65°C, it doesn't touch 90° C at load. The GPUs are warm, but don't heat up to 100° levels some other dual-GPU accelerators are infamous for. The new power-saving features that AMD integrated into their Cypress GPUs have become life-savers for this accelerator's overall outlook. If you recall, AMD kept its promise of keeping the idle-power draw for the single-GPU HD 5800 series accelerators under 30W. For the HD 5970, with an idle power draw of 39W, it more than fulfilled what many of you would be looking for in an accelerator this powerful to not guzzle down energy when rendering Firefox. With a peak power draw of 211W, it actually turns out a notch or two better than dual-GPU accelerators from the previous generation, which reflects on its performance-per-watt charts.

Part of what makes the Radeon HD 5970 an enthusiast-grade product is its overclocking headroom. With this release, AMD tried to brandish a "Massive Headroom" with overclocking. Given that the clock speeds of the GPUs and memory on this card are actually lower than those on the single-GPU HD 5870, AMD had to prove this by not only covering the natural headroom of Cypress' 850/1200 MHz, but also surpass it significantly. Our findings show that it's just about able to reach those speeds on the stock AMD cooler, though on the software-side, ATI Overdrive technically allows us to go further. It is beyond this point that third-party cooling needs to substitute air-cooling. Leading water-cooling brands have already come up with designs of full-coverage water-blocks, while liquid-nitrogen evaporators aren't hard to innovate. Giving it the best conditions, 1000 MHz on the core, and 1500 MHz on the memory don't seem impossible, taking into account extreme cooling, voltmods and cherry picking. If you're expecting all that headroom on the air-cooler, you better hail from a very cold country.

Finally, the dreaded price-tag. With prices starting at USD 599, the HD 5970 is uncomfortably pricey. Even given the generosity AMD showed with its choice of components, $549 would have been reasonable, $499 pleasant. Perhaps an important factor driving this is the availability. Since its launch, graphics cards based on the AMD Cypress GPUs aren't very regularly spotted in stores and on e-tailers. Hopefully things improve, and fast, since some markets are already heading into the winter shopping season. Not being able to cash in on precious months' lead in time-to-market for the Radeon HD 5800 and HD 5900 series products compared to competitive DirectX 11 compliant products is not a good thing for AMD. In all, reviewing the Radeon HD 5970 has been like a sumptuous meal for us. Dual-GPU accelerators are all about performance, and being able to have it all in a single addon card. The HD 5970 changes the game in being a loud yet gentle beast. Go for one if you have the money, and your retailer has one to sell. Also check out our Crossfire Review of two of these cards.