Sapphire's New Radeon 5970: It's Bigger Than Yours
Competition in the video card market can be pretty cutthroat, particularly when it comes to predicting the whims of the enthusiast market. Companies regularly vie for the title of Largest Pe... Fastest Video Card Available and they're willing to pull out all the stops to take home the crown. Case in point: Sapphire. The manufacturer's latest Radeon 5970 design was on display at CeBIT this year and packing enough firepower to perforate a burro at 20 paces.
This new Radstrosity packs 4GB of RAM (2GB per GPU) and cranks up both the GPU and memory clocks. The GPU clock is boosted from 725MHz to 850MHz (a 17 percent increase) while the memory clock ticks up 20 percent from 1GHz to 1.2GHz. This inevitably begs the question of whether or not it can run Crysis. In fact, it can eat Crysis for breakfast while munching on a side of DirectX 11. There's no word on what it'll cost, but we're staring at a triple-thick mammoth with what look like CPU coolers welded over the twin graphics engines. Sapphire outfits this card with two eight-pin PCIe power slots instead of an eight-pin/six-pin combo—no word yet on whether or not you'll actually need two eight-pin cables to use the card.
It doesn't play Crysis so much as it causes one. With your wife.
We're not sure why Sapphire didn't opt for a water-cooled card, but we'll still take two.
This new Radstrosity packs 4GB of RAM (2GB per GPU) and cranks up both the GPU and memory clocks. The GPU clock is boosted from 725MHz to 850MHz (a 17 percent increase) while the memory clock ticks up 20 percent from 1GHz to 1.2GHz. This inevitably begs the question of whether or not it can run Crysis. In fact, it can eat Crysis for breakfast while munching on a side of DirectX 11. There's no word on what it'll cost, but we're staring at a triple-thick mammoth with what look like CPU coolers welded over the twin graphics engines. Sapphire outfits this card with two eight-pin PCIe power slots instead of an eight-pin/six-pin combo—no word yet on whether or not you'll actually need two eight-pin cables to use the card.
It doesn't play Crysis so much as it causes one. With your wife.
We're not sure why Sapphire didn't opt for a water-cooled card, but we'll still take two.
