The design of the new Radeon HD 5970 strongly resembles that of the Radeon HD 5870, and in fact telling them apart is quite difficult. That said, when compared to the single-GPU Radeon HD 5870, the 5970 is a few centimeters longer, measuring in at a staggering 30cm in length. This is by far the longest graphics card we have ever seen, sitting an incredible 6cm off the edge of a standard ATX motherboard.
The AMD reference cooler features a single 80mm blower fan, which is used to draw air from within the case and push it over the heatsinks fins where it will quickly warm up and then exit the case through the rear of the case. This is exactly the same design used in all high-end graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia for some time now.
Flipping the AMD reference Radeon HD 5970 over exposes the PCB as black. The traditional red used by ATI back in the day has been replaced by a more sinister looking black. There is also a black heat spreader on the rear of this graphics card, much like there was on the Radeon HD 5870. This heat spreader is used to cool down the memory chips placed on the rear of the graphics card.
Removing the heatsink exposes the two GPUs, GDDR5 memory chips, and a few other critical components. In fact, with the heatsink off the Radeon HD 5970 looks almost identical to the Radeon HD 4870 X2 we reviewed some time ago, though it is of course noticeably longer.
The key changes involve the new GDDR5 memory, improved power circuitry, and an updated 2.0 PEX bridge from PLX Technologies, which is used to link the GPUs together. All this hardware is cooled via the large heatsink that covers the majority of the 30cm long PCB.
Also worth mentioning is that the Radeon HD 5970 features two additional power connectors, a 6-pin and an 8-pin connector. This is the same configuration used by previous dual-GPU graphics cards such as the GeForce 9800 GX2 and Radeon HD 4870 X2, so current high-end power supplies should cater for this new graphics card.
The Radeon HD 5870 GPU, of which the Radeon HD 5970 carries two, uses a 40nm design which was first introduced with the Radeon HD 4770. This has allowed ATI to be quite aggressive with the core speed, clocking the GPU’s at 725MHz. That said, AMD does believe that with the aid of their flexible overclocking options the cores can be pushed much higher than this.
The GDDR5 memory works at an even more impressive frequency (1.0GHz x 4) on this particular model, while the card features a total memory capacity of 2GB. The core configuration of the Radeon HD 5970 GPU includes 1600 (320×5) SPUs, 80 TAUs (Texture Address Units), and 32 ROPs (Rasterization Operator Units), which is double that of the Radeon HD 4870 X2.
AMD’s reference card came with Hynix ICs on-board (H5GQ1H24AFR-T2C parts). These GDDR5 modules are rated for 1.25GHz operation, so we expect to push them beyond the stock 1.0GHz configuration.
The Radeon HD 5970 naturally supports CrossfireX technology, and therefore in the standard position we find a single connector for bridging two cards together. The only other connectors can be found on the I/O panel; our AMD sample featured two dual DVI connectors along with a Mini Display Port connection. It is worth noting that like the Radeon HD 5870, this version can also support a maximum resolution of 2560×1600 on not one but rather three monitors.
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