ATI Radeon HD 5970 Dual-GPU Powerhouse Review

Name: ATI Radeon HD 5970 Dual-GPU Powerhouse Review - Page 10
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, November 18, 2009, 12:01 AM EDT

AMD has stated that the Radoen HD 5970 is "unlocked" and well suited to overclocking. As such, we were curious to see how much frequency headroom the Radeon HD 5970 had left under its hood. So, for our next set of performance metrics, we spent some time overclocking the new Radeon HD 5970 using the Overdrive utility built into ATI's Catalyst drivers in addition to a simple over-volting utility AMD made available for testing.

Overclocking The Radeon HD 5970

Pedal To The Metal

The Radeon HD 5970's stock GPU and memory clock speeds are 725MHz and 1000MHz, respectively, at 1.05v (GPU) and 1.1v (memory). With a bump in voltage to 1.1625v for the GPU and 1.15v being supplied to the memory though, we were able to take those clocks up to 860MHz and 1.22GHz.

With clock speeds that high, the Radeon HD 5970 should be faster than a pair of Radeon HD 5870 cards running in CrossFire mode, and that's exactly what we observed. With the Radeon HD 5970 overclocked, we re-ran a couple of benchmarks at 1920x1200 and the card was able to pull ahead of the Radeon HD 5870 CrossFire setup.

We should note, that power consumption went way up for the Radeon HD 5970 while over-volted and overclocked. At stock settings, the card consumed 393 watts under load, but that number jumped to 460 watts with its frequencies and voltages tweaked.

Tags: AMD, ATI, Radeon, Gaming, DirectX, graphics, GPU, PCI Express, PCIe, dx11, Eyefinity

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com