AMD today officially announced the flagship installment in the line of graphics cards, the ATI Radeon HD 5970, which fully supports Microsoft Direct 11 technology and ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology.

Designed to support the most demanding PC games at ultra-high resolutions and image quality settings, the ATI Radeon HD 5970 has unlocked overclocking potential, granting access to every bit of power the card has to offer through ATI Overdrive technology. Now shipping from retailers and available in the channel, the ATI Radeon HD 5970 also launches today in new Alienware Area-51, Area-51 ALX and Aurora desktop PCs.



The card is essentially equipped with two HD 5870 GPUs on a single board. Each GPU is clocked at 725 MHz, delivering a processing power of 4.64 TeraFLOPS (single precision), a polygon throughput of 1.45 billion polygons/sec and a data fetch rate (32-bit) of 464 billion fetches/sec. The GDDR5 memory is clocked at 1.0 GHz. Maximum board power is 294 Watts while idle board power 51 Watts. The card offers a dual DVI and a DisplayPort interface.

	Radeon HD 5970	Radeon HD 5870	Radeon HD 5850
Manufacturing Process	40nm
GPU clock	725MHz	850MHz	725MHz
Stream Processing Units	1600 x 2	1600	1440
Texture Units	80 x 2	80	72
Memory	1GB×2 GDDR5	1GB GDDR5
Memory clock	1,000MHz	1,200MHz	1,000MHz
Memory interface	256bit×2	256bit
Color ROP Units	32×2	32
Maximum board power	294 Watts	188 Watts	152 Watts
Idle board power	51 Watts Watts	27 Watts

The increased overclocking capabilities of the ATI Radeon HD 5970 are enabled by the unique design of the card, which features advanced fan and vapor chamber technologies and a fully vented exhaust to keep the card cool and ensure overclocking headroom using ATI Overdrive technology.



Enthusiasts can expand their field of view, ATI Radeon HD 5970, driving up to three displays at once, delivering a maximum resolution of 7680x1600. For the first time ever, ATI CrossFireX technology leverages the power of multiple graphics processors to deliver even more game performance in 20 of today?s popular titles when using ATI Eyefinity technology, with more to come.

The ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics card delivers nearly 5 TeraFLOPS of compute power, ensuring high performance in the latest DirectX 11 games, as well as in previous versions of DirectX and OpenGL titles. Its graphics core built on 40nm process technology harnesses up to 3,200 stream processors. ATI Stream technology and the HD 5970 support both Direct Compute 11 and OpenCL industry standards for application acceleration.

The ATI Radeon HD 5970 is also power efficient by automatically powering down unused GPU resources when not in use, resulting in idle desktop power consumption as low as 42 watts.

The ATI Radeon HD 5970 is supported by add-in-board companies, including ASK, Asus, Club 3D, Diamond, Gigabyte, High Tech, MSI, Sapphire, Tul/Power Color, Visiontek and XFX.

The card is priced at $600, which sounds a good deal condidering that you would alternatively need to spend $800 ($400 x 2) for a CrossFire configuration with two Radeon HD 5870, or $600 for two Radeon HD 5850 CrossFire. Let's hope that the performance of the HD 5970 is equal or greater than these alternative configurations.

To celebrate the launch of the ATI Radeon HD 5970 and to conclude a series of contests created to celebrate AMD?s 40th anniversary year, AMD also announced the third and final contest designed to give back to AMD fans and supporters. Starting today, fans of AMD on Facebook will be able to enter to win one of 10 Microsoft Xbox 360s or one of 10 Wiis from Nintendo. One gaming system will be given away every weekday for four weeks. Full contest rules and details available online: www.amd.com/40years