ATI Radeon HD 5970

Full Review

The ATI Radeon HD 5970 (codenamed ‘Hemlock’) is the fastest consumer graphics card in the world, bar none. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s step back and take a look at the card.

The HD 5970 is essentially two HD 5870s (a card which we also branded the fastest single GPU graphics card in the world) running in one shell. As a result of the dual GPUs, the core clock speeds have been brought down to 725MHz per core. The card uses a 2x256 bit memory interface and has 2x1GB of GDDR5 memory. Like the other cards in ATI’s 5000 series, the HD 5970 supports DirectX 11 and ATI’s Eyefinity technology, which lets it output visuals to multiple displays.

The reference card that we got from ATI looked exactly like the HD 5870 except that it was longer…much longer. It is a sizeable card and under load it gets really hot. In fact in an open system in an air-conditioned room, the temperature touched 74°C when the card was under load. But then again if you are thinking of picking up this card, we probably wouldn’t need to tell you that you need a formidably large and well-cooled cabinet. The reference card had dual DVI ports and a Mini Display Port but you can expect different manufacturers to come up with varied permutations and combinations in terms of port types.

And now- the performance. Yes, the HD 5970 scored the highest frame-rates in our gaming benchmarks and the best scores in our synthetic benchmarks and it was how it racked up those numbers that made it so impressive. Needless to say, the card isn’t the fastest in the world by a narrow margin; in fact there is a 25% difference in performance between it and the previous champion- the Zotac GeForce GTX 295. The only time the two cards come close is in the 3D Mark ’06 test where the HD 5970 scored 21,035 points whereas the GTX 295 scored 21,013 points. Rest all the tests were pretty much whitewashes; in 3D Mark Vantage Extreme, the ATI’s score stood at 11,068, a cool 2,000 points ahead of the Nvidia. In Crysis at 1920x1200 at 8xAA and Very High settings, the HD 5970 was able to pump out 40fps. In Far Cry 2 at the same resolution and AA and at Ultra High settings, we got 84fps while in Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X., the card managed 95fps. In both cases there was at least 20fps between the two contenders.

The ATI Radeon HD 5970 costs a hefty Rs. 42,000, a sum that is surely no joke. However, it also brings blistering performance to the table combined with support for DirectX 11. Looking at the trend that ATI followed with the 4000 series, a price drop should be on the cards and that makes it an excellent proposition for the future. So, until Nvidia comes up with something faster, the HD 5970 is here to stay as the graphics card to beat.

We tested the card on a rig comprising of:

an Intel Core i7-965 processor
3GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 RAM
an 80GB Intel X25-M SSD

Bottom Line

The ATI Radeon HD 5970 is the world's fastest graphics card and serves up excellent performance.