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ATI Radeon HD 5970 review

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Verdict

Unsurprisingly, it's the fastest card we've ever seen, but it's far too expensive and bulky to be practical

Review Date: 19 Nov 2009

Reviewed By: Mike Jennings

Price when reviewed: £452 (£520 inc VAT)

Overall Rating

Features & Design
4 stars out of 6

Value for Money
2 stars out of 6

Performance
6 stars out of 6

ATI’s latest graphics card breaks from convention in more ways than one. Its name, for instance, doesn’t follow the precedent set by the dual-GPU Radeon HD 3870 X2 and HD 4870 X2 cards, and it’s also the largest graphics card we've ever seen, dwarfing our test motherboard at 32cm in length and weighing a socket-endangering 1.2kg.

The card’s specification continues to raise eyebrows. Two GPUs, based on the impressive Radeon HD 5870, boast a combined 3,200 stream processors and 4.3 billion transistors, and the 725MHz core clock generates a massive 4.65TFLOPS of computing power – far more than the 1.78TFLOPs of Nvidia’s most powerful chip, the GeForce GTX 295, or the 2.72TFLOPs provided by the HD 5870.

Elsewhere, the new 40nm cores are partnered with 2GB of 1,000MHz GDDR5 memory, while the RAM’s 256GB/sec of bandwidth is the highest we’ve ever encountered on a graphics card.

This mouth-watering list of specifications delivered, as expected, the best benchmark results ever. When placed in our test rig, which consists of an Intel Core i7-920 processor, MSI X58 Platinum motherboard and 2GB of DDR3 RAM, the HD 5970 blew away our three standard Crysis benchmarks, delivering a result of 62fps in our high-quality 1,600 x 1,200 test.

It wasn't troubled by more demanding quality levels and resolutions, either: the HD 5970 ran through our 1,920 x 1,200 very high quality test at 48fps, with this figure dropping to a still-playable 31fps when we upped the resolution to 2,560 x 1,600.

The HD 5970’s world-beating performance, though, comes with several major caveats. The first is the card's size, which will be too much for many PCs. We also found the HD 5970 both hot and loud. Even with such a large housing the two GPUs ran at 90 degrees after mere minutes of running our benchmarks, and the fan – which ran at around 25% of its 4,000rpm maximum speed – proved distracting even against a background noise of office air conditioning. We wouldn’t fancy being accompanied by its constant whine in a quiet living room or study.

And, while ATI is keen to boast about the HD 5970’s green credentials at idle it's still pretty hungry when pushed. Our rig idled at 143W, which isn't bad for a card this powerful, but those power demands shot up to 322W at peak performance – 70W more than the ATI HD 5870.

But perhaps the main problem - if you can find one at all with retail stocks not exactly overflowing - is the price. At around £451 exc VAT it’s nearly double the cost of an HD 5870, our current A List champion, and it’s hard to justify such an outlay when ATI's latest single-GPU card will cope effortlessly with any game you care to throw at it.

Author: Mike Jennings

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Comments

User comments

What's the point..really?

Only the most hardcore of gamers are likely to be in the target demographic for a card like this. For not much more you could get an XBox & an HD TV. I know what I'd buy, and it isn't this.

By mikeeJ on 19 Nov 2009

No business Apps for high end graphics?

Are PC games the only application for graphics cards, are there no business where the higher performance could equate to productivity gain?

By milliganp on 19 Nov 2009

Re: No business Apps for high end graphics?

@milliganp: Computer aided design (CAD) work requires high end graphics cards, but they tend to use cards specifically designed for that purpose. You can also do number-crunching (science/statistics) stuff, but there you need a general purpose graphics card (GPGPU). Most business apps work in 2D, so until Microsoft releases Word3D, or Second Life takes off for businesses, a gaming card isn't necessary at work.

By rupert_giles on 20 Nov 2009

Most Powerful and Advanced HD5970

That is too great, i got a video card of HD5870,from: http://www.it-battery.com/his-hd-5870-1gb-256bit-g
ddr5-pcie-graphics-card-p-1916.html

it is too great,raises this sword for gamers,that is a great felling, now HD5970 comes into market, much powerful than HD5870.

By Roynorton on 20 Nov 2009

Re: No business Apps for high end graphics?

@milliganp & @rupert_giles

As far as I'm aware GPGPU software is mainly used for engineering, physics, chemistry and mathematics - I would LOVE it to be available for statistical analysis, given that some procedures are simply too slow to run (or crash) when using a CPU.

By Peter_Tennant on 22 Nov 2009

Very much the point...

We should applaud innovation and welcome the fact that this card exceeds anything current games demand. Remember when games exceed cards? Isn't it better when cards exceed games, that way the price of cards will tend to come down and we'll all be more likely to play the newer games at higher settings.

By simontompkins on 22 Nov 2009

GPGPU Usage

The Stream API works for this GPU, so there's really not much distinguishing it from GPGPU except perhaps poor marketing. As for statistical software, the only reason science apps can use GPUs like Nvidia is because someone took initiative to code for it using an appropriate API. Nothing is keeping it from being useful for stats algorithms except algorithms than cannot be parallelized (usually not the case).

I personally plan to buy a Crossfire dual 5970 and use it as a GPGPU with Stream for my fluid dynamics applications. 9 Teraflops (or even 20% efficiency to get 2 Teraflops) is just beyond comprehension for a single machine maxing out at only $4,000. Needless to say, my mouth is indeed watering.

Given recent progress, I don't think it will be long before High Performance Computing steals the show because you'll never make a processor that's faster for HPC applications demand.

By mrnorman on 26 Apr 2010

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