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.