Review Cast your eye over our news piece on AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5970 and our review of the HD 5870 and you’ll have the essential information at your fingertips. AMD has, for some unknown reason, changed its naming convention, so this two-chip HD 5870-based graphics card has been named HD 5970 instead of the more predictable HD 5870 X2.
Sapphire’s Radeon HD 5970: overclocked, slightly
What we have here is a very long graphics card with two HD 5870 GPUs that are linked by a PCI Express 2.1 bridge chip along with two groups of GDDR 5 memory that total 2GB. A single HD 5870 chip packs 1600 Stream processors into one 40nm core, so the HD 5970 has a startling total of 3200 shaders.
The key features have been carried over from the HD 5870, including support for DirectX 11, triple monitor support with ATI Eyefinity and some nifty power-saving technology. That said, although AMD has worked wonders to reduce the power draw of the HD 5000 series at idle, the fact remains that the two chips draw plenty of power when they are under load. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Before we dive into our review of the HIS Digital HD 5870 and Sapphire HD 5870 graphics cards, let’s take a quick look at the technology behind the AMD’s new family of graphics chips.
Sapphire’s Radeon HD 5870: a 50 per cent gaming performance boost…
These DirectX 11 graphics cores use the same 40nm fabrication process that we saw in the ATI Radeon HD 4770 and this has allowed AMD to increase the transistor count by a huge margin. The 55nm HD 4870 packed 956m transistors into a die size of 263mm² while the new 40nm HD 5870 has 2.15bn transistors – 2.25 times more – in a die area of 334mm², 27 per cent bigger than the previous one.
Most of those extra transistors have been used to double the number of stream processors, or unified shaders, and the remainder support the DirectX 11 features that will be introduced with Windows 7. Read the rest of this entry »
