The ATI Radeon HD 5970 is AMDs first attempt at a dual-gpu graphics card and their premier effort to take the “Most Powerful GPU” title.

Performance

When it comes to performance, things don’t start out too well for the 5970. The first game we put it through was DiRT 2, currently the only game with DirectX 11 support and therefore we expected amazing performance. However we struggled to get the FPS above 40 or 50 which considering its supposed power this is fairly disappointing. In comparison, a 4890 we tried the same game with was able to average above 50fps.

Then, after loading up Resident Evil 5‘s benchmark, things got even worse. Not in performance terms, oh no, we couldn’t actually get far enough into the benchmark without it crashing the system to get a full test in.

So what’s causing this apparent lack of power, well it seems that it is all down to the drivers. ATI are notorious for being behind when it comes to drivers and even after updating to the latest we still experienced this power failure. Resident Evil’s problems can be excused as its a Nvidia centric game, but the lack of “epicness” in DIRT 2 is tougher to ignore as it’s bigged up as a ATI game with DX 11, in fact there was even a DIRT 2 sticker on the 5970′s box.

From left: Radeon HD 5770, HD 5850, HD 5870, and HD 5970.

Size

When we got our hands on a 5970 we didn’t expect to have to worry about the size. However when fitting it in our case (a fairly large Lancool K62) we found that we needed to remove the hard drive bays to get the beast to fit in, and even then we only had one PCI-E slot that would fit it, no chance for crossfire in this case then.

It is huge though, so if you’re considering buying one ensure that you have checked the dimensions of your case.

Overclocking

Now our experience of GPU overclocking has had variable results in the past, but the 5970 really does have a lot to give.

In order to keep the peak wattage below 300W AMD limited the card to a 6-pin and 8-pin power connectors, with the PCI-e bus included that amounts to 300W available to the card. With a decent PSU though we can crank that up closer to the 400W mark that the reference cooler has been designed to handle.

With some fairly low-level tweaking we managed to get well over 900MHz on the core and 1.2GHz on the memory side. This gave us an 80 per cent boost over the 5870 on Far Cry 2 and a massive 93 per cent increase in our DX11 Heaven benchmark.

That said you will have to put up with a noisy ol’ reference fan and one hot-as-hell card roaring away inside your machine.

Should you get one?

When you’re getting performance results like that then the 5970 becomes more of an appealing prospect. Once the clocks get above the 5870′s stock settings then you can really see the value (and we hesitate to use that word) in this multi-GPU setup, and why it’s seen as more than just a 5870×2.

But should you buy one? Well, if powering a couple of 30-inch high-res gaming screens is what you’re after, and money has never been an object, then you could maybe consider the purchase.

Hell, you may even be able to hire your own personal coder to develop private drivers when it fails to run a new game…

For the rest of us though it’s a step too far. The original 5870 is a pricey beast, with the more reasonable 5850 a better bet for DX11 gaming, so the 5970 is just the GPU equivalent of a £1,000 CPU. Great if you never had to ask about the price, but not so much better as to make it a must.