XFX 5970 4GB "6" BE and Sapphire 5970 4GB

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Muffin Man

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HEXUS.net - News :: XFX preps 4GB Radeon HD 5970 Eyefinity 6 Black Edition : Page - 1/1

XFX's card, tentatively dubbed the Radeon HD 5970 Black Edition Limited, has been pictured by German website Tweakers.net and is said to be sporting a couple of useful extras, and then some.

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Despite looking a lot like a regular Radeon HD 5970, XFX's card is said to stray from AMD's reference design by featuring a pair of GPUs clocked at 850MHz apiece, attached to a a massive 4GB GDDR5 frame buffer clocked at an effective 4,800MHz.

Put two and two together and you might conclude that this is in fact two Radeon HD 5870 cores on a single PCB - ala the Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 4GB seen earlier this week.

Should that be the case, XFX is likely to need something a little bit more lively in terms of cooling, and the pictured heatsink-and-fan is said to be merely a pre-production sample, with something else in store for the final retail model. Speaking of production, XFX is believed to be producing just 1,500 of these cards, and it'll be bringing them to retail at around $1,000 each.

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The seemingly-hidden stack of goodies doesn't end with the souped-up GPUs, either. Take a look at the card's outputs and you'll notice it stands out from the crowd with support for ATI Eyefinity 6, via half-a-dozen mini DisplayPort outputs.

All that goodness is going to need a fair bit of power, of course, and the card will be fed by dual eight-pin power connectors.

It won't be cheap to buy, and it won't be cheap to run, but if you're going to go ahead and game on six monitors at once, this is probably the way to do it.

Sapphire ready to launch Radeon "HD 5990 4GB" - Bright Side Of News*
Sapphire's New Radeon 5970: It's Bigger Than Yours - HotHardware

We met with Dan Forster and Bill Donnelly of Sapphire fame and got introduced to new products. It seems GeForce GTX 480 will have one tough battle on its hands, as Sapphire preps "HD5990".

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In our opinion, Sapphire's "HD5990" has everything enthusiast might want - for the non-scalable titles, Sapphire's HD5970 OC will perform as a HD 5870 until AMD gets the drivers right, rather than suffering HD 5850 performance. With this board, you get what you don't get with a regular one: custom tailored eight-heatpipe heatsink by Arctic Cooling will keep the board more cooler than the standard ATI heatsink, yet it supports higher clocks.

The clocks on this "HD5990" are 850 MHz [realistically, 853 MHz] and 1200 MHz QDR for the 4GB of GDDR5 memory. Grand total bandwidth of the board is 307.2 GB/s - just like the Ares we described earlier. However, unlike ASUS HD 5970 Ares, Sapphire didn't physically enlarge the product - so the PCB is of standard height and should have no clearance issues even in narrow cases. If you can fit an HD5970, you can fit this board.

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.

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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.
 
I like the looks of that Sapphire card, the custom Arctic Cooling heatsink would keep me from buying an aftermarket replacement. I'd be Top Dog with a pair of those :D
 
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