The ATI Radeon HD 5970 - meet the new king

AMD has been on a tear releasing new DirectX11-capable Radeon HD 5000 series parts. Over the past month or two, the company released the Radeon HD 5870, the Radeon HD 5850, the Radeon HD 5770, and the Radeon HD 5750. All of those cards were apparently just the appetizers. Today, the company unveiled the Radeon HD 5970, a beast of a card that weighs in with dual GPUs, 2GB of RAM, and a $600 price tag that should make more than a few people dizzy.

Like other Radeon HD 5000 series cards, the Radeon HD 5970 comes with support for DirectX11 and triple monitor outputs capable of Eyefinity. Each of the GPUs has 1,600 stream processors, giving the HD 5970 a total of 3,200 stream processors. The core clock is set at 725MHz, and the memory is set at 1GHz. By comparison, the Radeon HD 5870 has an 850MHz core and 1.2GHz memory. When you get down to it, the Radeon HD 5970 is the equivalent of two Radeon HD 5870s slapped together and running slightly slower. ATI made it a point to tell us that the card is highly overclockable: ours made its way up to a 795MHz core clock and 1150MHz on the RAM.

To say the card is large is an understatement. It's roughly a foot long, which means it's going to be a tough squeeze fitting it into anything but the largest of cases. Forget the card exists if you have a small form-factor PC, and quite likely if you have a medium-sized computer. If you're even vaguely contemplating picking up a Radeon HD 5970, do yourself a favor and pull out a ruler to see if it will fit. In all likelihood you're going to have to move a hard drive and likely even remove an entire hard drive cage.

The Radeon HD 5970 gets difficult to test if you're not a computer store. We've got a room full of stuff, and even then we're outclassed by this video card. We've got 24-inch monitors that run at 1920x1200, and the Radeon HD 5970 trots all over them. Even a single 30-inch monitor with a resolution of 2560x1600 wouldn't stress it enough. Our results show that the Radeon HD 5970 is quick, but it's capable of much more. We're actually going to have to defer to Anandtech if you want a full performance rundown.

If speed's the name of the game, the Radeon HD 5970 qualifies handily. With a $600 price tag and performance that falls off the right end of the charts, it gets hard to recommend simply because you're going to need so much more to tap its potential. At the very minimum, you'll need three 24-inch monitors, which cost roughly $750 or more combined. To seriously use the Radeon HD 5970, three 30-inchers will cost over $3,500, and at that point you might as well spend the extra $600 on a second Radeon HD 5970 (since the Radeon HD 5970 is the only Radeon 5000 series card capable of Eyefinity support in Crossfire at the moment). For the rest of the population (all 99.9999999 percent of us), we're better off scratching that pixel-pushing itch with something considerably less expensive.