A Closer Look

Taking the card apart takes a bit of patience because there are a lot more screws involved than on previous products. As a first step we removed the backplate of the card.


The backplate is made from metal and cools a bunch of memory chips on this side of the PCB. It also serves as protection against physical damage when handling the card.


Then we removed the main cooler which is a complex piece of hardware, it cools the GPU, memory and several smaller components. It is also quite heavy and looks like it adds quite some cost to the card's design.


Disassembling the cooler module we can see that it consists of several parts. First there is a copper baseplate that uses vapor chamber technology. Think of it as a big heatpipe surface that covers the whole baseplate. This results in greatly optimized heat transfer to the aluminum cooling fins that sit in airflow generated by the fan.


According to AMD the card fits within a 300W power budget. That's why we see a 6-pin and an 8-pin connector here (75W slot + 75W 6-pin + 150W 8-pin = 300W). It should also be noted that the PCB has been designed with the option for a second 8-pin power connector. According to AMD they do not expect partners to release customized versions of the card utilizing this or any other change before Q2 2010.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix and carry the model number H5GQ1H24AFR-T2C. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


It seems AMD went all out when they designed the power circuitry of the Radeon HD 5970. The card features three Volterra voltage regulators that support software voltage control.


The PCI-Express bridge chip which connects the two GPUs and interfaces with the system via PCI-Express 2.0 is made by PLX. Apparently PLX lets ATI rebrand their product. According to AMD the bridge chip supports PCI-Express 2.1 x16 which supplies enough bandwidth to both GPUs for any situation.


Even though the product's codename is "Hemlock", AMD uses two Cypress GPUs (like on the HD 5850 and HD 5870) for the HD 5970. However, it should be noted that these chips were binned for lower leakage which helps to reduce the power consumption. Cypress comes with 2154 million transistors each and is made in a 40 nm production process at TSMC Taiwan.