Overclocking ATI’s Radeon HD 5970
Although ATI felt the pressure to keep its Radeon HD 5970 under 300W for the sake of those folks with 750 and 850W power supplies, the card was originally designed to hit 5870 frequencies and deal with the corresponding thermal load that would have created. Thus, you have hardware on-board well-suited for overclocking, yet technically overkill for the 5970’s stock specifications.
There’s the 400W-capable vapor chamber-based cooler, for example. ATI also uses a programmable PWM fan controller able to monitor 12 different points on the board. Screened ASICs, higher-binned memory chips, and beefier digital VRMs are all part of the effort to infuse extra headroom “similar to what you get on a Black Edition Phenom II,” AMD says. That last part is a bit ironic; anyone willing to spend $600 on graphics should be looking to an overclocked Core i7 to help balance it out.
Complementing the purportedly more-scalable hardware is a bit of special software. The voltage tweaking utility comes first. ATI’s reference example took our GPU from 1.05V to 1.1625V and our memory from 1.1V to 1.15V. We’re curious to see if third-party board vendors choose any voltage levels above or below those levels. Second, ATI caps the core and memory clocks much higher, letting you choose up to 1,000/1,500 MHz frequencies. We were able to get our sample stable at 925/1,300MHz.
I’m not a huge fan of running overclocking numbers on vendor-supplied launch samples for fairly obvious reasons. However, overclocking is supposed to be a big part of what makes this board unique, so without further ado…
All of our numbers here are at 1920x1200 (or 1900x1200 in the case of Crysis), with game-specific details listed on the y-axis. As you can see, in some cases, overclocking has a profound effect on performance—from between 30%+ in Far Cry 2 to just under 2% in the very CPU-bound Left 4 Dead.
Unfortunately, hitting Radeon HD 5870 frequencies (850/1,200 MHz) requires upping the 5970’s voltages in order to achieve stability.
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amd did it again! WOW,..aren't we all shocked! lets see something out of their cpu line now! Ati's a life saver!!!
pity Toms forgot to include triple GTX285s
If they include triple GTX285s they will include 2 5970 aswell.
But the people who are gonna pay 1110$ for the gtx's or 1200$ for the dual 5970 really dont need the benchmarks, for them its a presitige to have this, so including them in this article is kinda useless.
All Hail ATi!!!
What a huge piece of tech!
Anyone else see the potential for a 5990 with GPUs shipped at 5870 speeds?
it even has solder points to make the 6pin into an 8pin PCIe power connector!
Can someone please explain to me why these graphics cards are referred to as 'discrete'? They're like the absolute least discrete components in my machine. Now that I mention it, why are they still called graphics cards and not graphics bricks??
And another question... are AMD aware that this card is bottlenecked by their fastest CPU? That means they are pretty much forcing customers who buy this to Intel .... what were they thinking??
AMD better put their foot down on those 6-core chips.
Awesome! cant wait to get my hands on one!
And still Crysis cannot be played at full detail with Aliasing / Filtering on as well @ 1080p...
You know what is the best thing about this card? OMFG!!! 640 euros!! Now that, my friends, is the best feature AMD could have implemented!!!
P.S :640 Euros = 957.95200 U.S. dollars. But wait, this card is 660 U.S. dollars = 440.940673 Euros.
Can someone please explain to me why these graphics cards are referred to as 'discrete'? They're like the absolute least discrete components in my machine. Now that I mention it, why are they still called graphics cards and not graphics bricks??
graphics mountains more like it
@Dandalf:
You seem to be confusing "discrete" with "discreet".
5970 is £574 at Novatech, I'm tempted but I'll wait for Nvidia's release.
i wish i could buy it.
This beast make my GTX275 looks like little toy..*sigh* even a tri sli cant even be compared with it..time to break my piggy bank LoL
Woop jimb you are right! My second point stands though
From dictionary.com
1. Constituting a separate thing
adj.
1. Marked by, exercising, or showing prudence and wise self-restraint in speech and behavior; circumspect.
2. Free from ostentation or pretension; modest.
Oh and the 5970 seems amazing. Out of my budget though, but then I'm happy with my 4850 which is considered weak sauce compared to these!
strictly for idiots.
I've got 2 HD5870's
better than HD5970 right?