Radeon HD 5970 pictured and tested

[Andreas G]

AMD's graphics card flagship, Radeon HD 5870, keeps more than a safe distance to the competition, but when you add dual-GPU cards it all becomes tougher. To convince the last doubters that AMD is the indisputable King of the Hill it is also working on a graphics card with dual Cypress GPUs. The graphics card will launch as the Radeon HD 5900 series and now we have pictures and benchmarks with AMD's Hemlock concept.

Hemlock is the code name and since AMD hasn't made any official statements regarding the performance or status the card this is mainly a matter of tests and pictures of an engineering sample, not what you will see on the store shelves.

The flagship will most likely be named Radeon HD 5970 and is a realm monster. Not just performance, as we expected, but also physically. The card is 34cm long (13 3/8"), which mean some cases may not be able to house it.

The cooler looks like an extension, literally, of the single-GPU card Radeon HD 5870. The card gets its power from one 8-pin and one 6-pin molex connector and could draw more than 300W at maximal load.

The card operates at slightly lower clock frequencies, 725MHz GPU and 4000MHz memory, than the single-GPU card. These are just preliminary numbers and may change before the launch.

Alienbabeltech removed the numbers after the initial release, but not before we managed to snatch them.

[theredhairball]

OVER 300w? A 6-pin provides 75w, the PCI-E slot provides 75w, and doesn't the 8-pin provide 150w? They're really pushing it with this thing. It's going to be a real monster. Imagine xfire with it .
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[Delph1]

Just to add, the drivers seem quite poor and performance is not quite right.

//Andreas
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