HD 5970 CrossFireX







Today marks a 'red'-letter day of sorts for AMD, which looks to reclaim performance

leadership in the graphics cards industry with its new flagship ATI Radeon HD 5970

graphics accelerator. Of all the products AMD has been working on over the past year,

we bet this product won the most anticipation, since the "next big thing" from a

company in the hardware industry often defines its market position, and competitiveness

as a solution provider. The Radeon HD 5970 makes use of two AMD Cypress GPUs in an

internal multi-GPU configuration. The accelerator is compliant with Microsoft DirectX

11, which forms one of the important features of the company's Windows 7 operating

system, and is a next-generation multimedia API. AMD Cypress on the other hand, with

the recently launched Radeon HD 5800 series products, has established itself as the

industry's single most powerful graphics processor.

For computer enthusiasts, replenished competition from either sides is always a win.

Professional overclockers looking forward to the next big contest will naturally eye an

accelerator that makes use of two of the most powerful GPUs on the planet. For the

long-sighted buyer who is willing to splurge, this is potentially a one-time investment

that secures future-proofing for long.

The Radeon HD 5970 packs two AMD Cypress GPUs with 1600 stream processors each (total

3200), and holds 1 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface per GPU

(total 2 GB of memory on board, across a 2x 256-bit wide memory interface).

Shader Units:    1600
ROP's:      32
GPU:      Cypress
Transistors:   2154M
Memory:      1024 MB
Core Clock:   850 MHz
Memory clock:   1200 MHz   
Installation

Installation of HD 5970 CrossFireX is as easy as installing any other multi-GPU setup.

Ensure that your motherboard features two PCI-Express slots for the cards to be

installed in, and supports the ATI CrossFire technology. Also, ensure that your

power-supply unit is reasonably powerful. Based on our findings, and given our test

machine, we recommend at least a 750W power-supply. Install the two accelerators, upon

installing the drivers, you will be prompted to enable CrossFireX, and will be able to

verify if the two cards are working in tandem.