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AMD’s Radeon HD 5970 takes the performance crown, and now offers DirectX 11 GPUs top to bottom.
You can forgive AMD for stealing a line from Nvidia’s playbook. From the name and marketing materials, it’s not obvious that this card is a dual GPU card. One AMD chart even refers to the card as the “ATI Radeon HD 5970 GPU,” much like Nvidia’s 295 GTX is a dual GPU card that’s sold as if it were a normal graphics card.
Let’s take a quick look at the speeds and feeds of the new card, and then discuss additional features. We’ll compare them to the Radeon HD 5870 single GPU card; there are differences in core and memory clock speeds.
| Model | HD 4870 | HD 5970 |
|---|---|---|
| GPU | Single HD 5870 GPU | Dual HD 5870 GPUs |
| Stream Processors | 1600 | 3200 |
| Core Clock | 850MHz | 725MHz |
| Memory | 1GB 1200MHz GDDR5 | 2GB 1000MHz GDDR5 |
| Texture Units | 80 | 160 |
| ROPs | 32 | 64 |
| Memory Data Rate | 4.8Gbps | 4.0Gbps |
| Compute Performance | 2.72TFLOPs | 4.64TFLOPs |
| Idle Power | 27W | 42W |
| Max Power | 188W | 294W |
Most features simply double, since there are two identical GPUs with the same memory per GPU. However, note the memory bandwidth is lower, since the memory clock is lower. Also, overall compute performance isn’t quite double, since the engine clock for each GPU defaults to 725MHz, rather than the single GPU 5870’s 850MHz.
In addition to the paired GPUs, the card maximizes performance with a new second generation PLX PCI Express 2.1 bridge chip. This speeds up communications between the two GPUs.
The older Radeon HD 4870 X2, AMD’s last dual GPU card, often suffered from serious overheating problems, so AIT has taken steps to improve overall thermal efficiency. The first step is to used specially screened GPU chips with the minimum amount of leakage current. The thermal system consists of a vapor chamber, with heat dissipation via a fully vented exhaust system. Finally, a multipoint, programmable PWM fan controller ensures fan speeds consistent with overall thermal output. The whole affair is rated to dissipate 400W, or over 100W of headroom.
The use of low leakage GPUs suggests that the core clock speeds could be pushed higher than the default 725MHz. Given that the card can dissipate 400W of overall thermal output, ATI has decided to leave the card unlocked, letting users overclock it to their heart’s content. The company is even making available an overvoltage tool, and suggests that the card has enough headroom to push the engine clock to above the 850MHz of the single GPU HD 5870 and the memory speeds up to the 1200MHz of the 5870. In The HD 5970 also sports sophisticated digital voltage regulators, real time power monitoring and Japanese pure ceramic capacitors, which facilitate higher clock speeds. (The reason for the more conservative default clock speeds is that the company needs to make allowances for the thermal environment inside PC cases, which may be less optimal.)
What about power efficiency? The HD 5970 offers the same clock gating capability as the single GPU variant. In addition, the card offers an ultra low power state that puts one GPU to sleep, which cuts the overall power draw of that GPU by half the normal idle performance. The card idles at 42W, only 15W higher than the 27W of the HD 5870. Of course, the card sucks 294W at full throttle – and that’s at the default clock speeds. So you’ll need a power supply with the later PCI Express 8-pin power connector – the HD 5970 uses one eight pin and one six pin connector from the PSU.
The onboard connectors are slightly different from the original HD 5870: two DVI-I connectors and one mini-DisplayPort attachment, first popularized with Apple’s MacBook Pro laptops and iMacs. All three can be attached simultaneously, and drive three displays at the same time. Note that most DisplayPort enabled monitors which aren’t Apple displays ship with standard sized DisplayPort cables, so you’ll need to obtain a mini-DisplayPort to standard DisplayPort cable if you want to take advantage of that connection option.
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