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.