Introduction

Today marks a 'red'-letter day of sorts for AMD, which looks to reclaim performance leadership in the graphics cards industry with its new flagship ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics accelerator. Of all the products AMD has been working on over the past year, we bet this product won the most anticipation, since the "next big thing" from a company in the hardware industry often defines its market position, and competitiveness as a solution provider. The Radeon HD 5970 makes use of two AMD Cypress GPUs in an internal multi-GPU configuration. The accelerator is compliant with Microsoft DirectX 11, which forms one of the important features of the company's Windows 7 operating system, and is a next-generation multimedia API. AMD Cypress on the other hand, with the recently launched Radeon HD 5800 series products, has established itself as the industry's single most powerful graphics processor.

For computer enthusiasts, replenished competition from either sides is always a win. Professional overclockers looking forward to the next big contest will naturally eye an accelerator that makes use of two of the most powerful GPUs on the planet. For the long-sighted buyer who is willing to splurge, this is potentially a one-time investment that secures future-proofing for long.

The Radeon HD 5970 packs two AMD Cypress GPUs with 1600 stream processors each (total 3200), and holds 1 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface per GPU (total 2 GB of memory on board, across a 2x 256-bit wide memory interface).

In this review, we will evaluate the performance, thermal, electrical, and acoustic characteristics of the ASUS EAH5970 Radeon HD 5970 graphics accelerator.

Packaging

ASUS ships their EAH5970 in a big and colorful package that communicates all important product highlights on the front, the back has more detail in multiple languages.



You will receive:

• Graphics Card
• CrossFire Bridge
• Dirt 2 Coupon (Steam required)
• PCI-Express power adapter
• Mini-DisplayPort to DisplayPort adapter
• Documentation + Driver CDs
• DVI to HDMI Adapter
• Leather CD case

Architecture

AMD's dual-GPU graphics cards in recent times have carried a simple design methodology: There are two graphics processors, each with its own memory and voltage regulation circuitry. One of the two gets to be connected to the displays. Both GPUs then have PCI-Express x16 connections to a PCI-Express bridge chip, which broadcasts data from the host system, to which it is directly connected over the card's PCI-Express x16 interface. The two GPUs have a CrossFire connection (through the bridge), and can connect to up to two more GPUs of its kind over external CrossFire (in which there are multiple graphics cards connected using CrossFire cables). The card's internal CrossFire between its GPUs is enabled by default, not requiring the user to do anything beyond installing the accelerator like any other. The internal CrossFire is neutral to the system it is installed on, and hence it doesn't matter which make the system's chipset is. Have PCI-Express x16, will work.



With the Radeon HD 5970, it's no different. Each GPU is based on AMD's TeraScale 2 Architecture that offers over 2 TFLOPs of processing power. Each GPU has 1600 stream processors, arranged into 20 SIMD engines, each with 16 thread processors that have 5 processing cores each. There are 80 texture units per GPU, and 32 raster operation units. Built on the 40 nm silicon process by TSMC, the GPUs employ new energy-saving performance profiles that are found to offer some of the lowest power draws in idle, and some of the highest performance per Watt, when on the job. Each GPU uses a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, which provides 128 GB/s of memory bandwidth (256 GB/s for the entire card). The slightly improved PCI-Express bridge chip now supports the new PCI-Express 2.1 standard. According to AMD the new PCI-E 2.0 bridge chip has so much bandwidth that the mythical sideport from HD 4870 X2 can no longer be useful - not even in theory.

The Card

AMD continues their design theme of the Radeon HD 5000 Series. The cooler looks extremely powerful, yet not styled to the extreme. It conveys a feeling of powerful understatement. The surface feels "high quality", yet I like the surface of the HD 5870 cooler a little bit more. ASUS has put a carbon-fibre look sticker on their cooler which definitely adds to the overall appearance. In my opinion this approach looks a lot better than a sticker with dancing anime girls.


From left to right: GeForce GTX 295 Single PCB, Radeon HD 4870 X2, Radeon HD 5870, Radeon HD 5970. Sizewise this card reminds me of some old ISA graphics cards that were huge and took up most of the case. The exact length of the card is 31 cm (from slot cover to end of fan). Please make sure your case has enough space to accommodate this card.


Dual slot card, no surprises here. The red trim on the side, with the "ATI Radeon" text, is aligned so that it can be read when the card is installed in a normal case with window.


On the back plate you have a stamped ATI Radeon Premium Graphics logo which will also be visible if you have a case window.


The card has two DVI-D ports, and one mini-DisplayPort. This is just one of many output configurations that are possible on the new cards, thanks to the overhauled display output logic. Basically the card can drive six TMDS signals that can be combined in any way (a dual-link DVI consumes two TMDS lines).
For HDMI Audio, NVIDIA requires you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable. AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users. Also AMD's integrated sound device has been upgraded to support HDMI 1.3a which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 8.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit.


On the back of the card you see two nicely styled air vents that look great, yet have no cooling function. Most air is sucked in via the fan opening.


Using the lone CrossFire bridge connector, the Radeon HD 5970 can pair with one more of its kind. Later down the line, one can expect being able to pair this with other graphics cards that use the AMD Cypress GPU, though nothing specific in this regard has been disclosed.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.