Sapphire HD 5970 OC

Introduction

It seems like every year we are presented with a brand new graphics card that leaps ahead of the competition and steals the performance crown. This last happened when the Nvidia GTX295 jumped ahead of the 4870X2. Recharged, ATI is finally ready to jump ahead of Nvidia with the 5970. ATI made an interesting choice on the name here. Previously they included an X2 after the name of the card's GPU's. This time ATI decided to just name the series of cards with a flat number, similar to what Nvidia has done with the GTX295.

In an interesting move Sapphire has decided to not only release their version of the 5970 on launch day, but include an overclocked edition! Overclocked editions have always had marginally better performance, which puts the card at a slight advantage when being researched by the consumer. We expect this to be no different here, and we should actually see slightly more performance since there are two GPU's on this card. The part that is the most worrisome is the cooling ability of the stock cooler. The 4870X2 no doubt ran very hot if the fan on the card was not turned up. Hopefully this issue will be fixed for the 5970.

Enough of the delay. Lets take a nice look at the card to set the mood.

The card certainly looks pretty huge compared to the box. Lets take a look at the specifics of the 5970.