A few days earlier, AMD's Matt Skynner displayed the company's newest graphics card that seeks to extend the performance leadership currently held by Radeon HD 5970. The dual-GPU AMD Radeon HD 6990, codenamed "Antilles", makes use of two 40 nm "Cayman" GPU, which powers the single-GPU HD 6950 and HD 6970. The core configuration of Cayman in Antilles is not known. The card itself keeps up with the product styling that all Radeon HD 6000 series carry, it's about as long as the HD 5970.

This time, AMD is toying with a revolutionary new cooler design that makes use of a cylindrical blower (like ones used in air-curtains, on a much smaller scale) to draw air from the rear portion of the cooler, and circulate through the complex vapor-chamber enhanced heatsink inside. In other words, the card lacks a fan intake hole where it's typically located, but the rear portion serves that purpose. Power is drawn in from two 8-pin PCI-E power connectors. AMD is expected to release the new enthusiast graphics card in this quarter.

Even as NVIDIA is taking its own sweet time to complete building its lineup of DirectX 11 compliant GPUs to target all market segments, AMD, which got a 6 months' headstart into releasing its lineup, which ended up targeting all market segments in a span of 5 months, is readying the Radeon HD 6000 series for launch well within this year. Just as the Radeon HD 5000 series GPU family was codenamed Evergreen with its members codenamed after evergreen trees (such as Cypress, Juniper, Redwood, Cedar), the Radeon HD 6000 is codenamed "Southern Islands", with its members codenamed after islands in the Caribbean (not islands in the Mediterranean).

"Bart" (after Saint Barthélemy island) is the codename for the performance/upper-mid segment GPU, a successor to the "Juniper" Radeon HD 5700 series. "Cayman" (after Cayman Islands) is the enthusiast GPU, successor to Cypress, and will go into making SKUs that succeed the Radeon HD 5800 series. Finally, the king of the hill is codenamed "Antilles" (after Antilles Islands), it is the dual-GPU SKU that makes use of two Cayman GPUs, successor to the Radeon HD 5970 "Hemlock". AMD partners will be in a position to sell graphics cards based on these by November 2010. The Radeon HD 6970 "Antilles" should be out by December 2010. The lower-half of the family will likely release next year.

PowerColor's latest high end graphics card which surfaced in April, as a graphics card with the ability to run 12 displays in ATI Eyefinity arrays, seems to have finally taken shape, with the company calling it the PowerColor HD 5970 Eyefinity 12. This graphics card is based on the Radeon HD 5970 dual-GPU graphics card, but makes use of display outputs from both GPUs.

PowerColor had to extend the connectivity on a third slot with mini-Display Port connectors, as it ran out on space with two slots holding 6 connectors and the crucial air-exhaust vent. The second set of mini-DP connectors sit on a riser card, which is detachable, turning the card into a dual-slot Eyefinity6 card. To help handle 12 display heads, the card has 4 GB of GDDR5 memory spread across two 256-bit wide memory interfaces. It is capable of running large Eyefinity display heads which span across all the 12 physical displays. The Eyefinity12 card from PowerColor is expected to be launched during the Computex event, early next month.

Leading graphics supplier, SAPPHIRE Technology, has begun sampling the world's fastest graphics card, the SAPPHIRE HD 5970 4G TOXIC Edition. Previewed at CeBit 2010, the SAPPHIRE HD 5970 4G TOXIC Edition has 4GB of fifth generation GDDR5 memory, a total of 3200 stream processors and 160 texture units and runs with world leading clock speeds of 900MHz core and 1200MHz for memory (4.8GHz effective). This is significantly faster than the standard model, and makes the SAPPHIRE HD 5970 4GB TOXIC Edition not only the fastest card in its class, but the fastest in the world.

With twice the computing power of the highly acclaimed SAPPHIRE HD 5870 Series, this new HD 5970 model shares all the exciting features of the HD 5000 family - including support for the DirectCompute 11 instruction set of Microsoft DirectX 11, hardware tessellation and multi threaded communication with the system CPU. It also enables the acceleration of applications supported by ATI Stream, and the ability to display across three monitors simultaneously with ATI Eyefinity. All of this comes with a modest active power consumption and ATI Powerplay Dynamic Power Management to achieve super-low power consumption in 2D and idle modes.

Arctic Cooling has a long history of making excellent aftermarket coolers for AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards. Their latest innovation is the triple slot Accelero Xtreme 5970 which supports AMD's dual-GPU HD 5970 cards. Sapphire has chosen to use this very cooling solution for their HD 5970 OC 4 GB flagship, of course the cooler will be available in retail as well.