Return of the King: AMD HD 5970 Leaks, Looks Poised to Seize Performance Crown

From DailyTech: The AMD/ATI success story in the GPU sector has shown little signs of fading with the transition from the 4000 series to the 5000 series. Continuing its competitive pricing, AMD's 5870, 5850, 5770 and 5750, the world's first DirectX 11 GPUs, are all showing strong sales in their respective price ranges, leaving NVIDIA in a painful wait for its Fermi series to reach market readiness.

Now AMD is reportedly preparing to take the single-card performance crown, currently held by the GTX 295 away from NVIDIA, with the release of a dual GPU single-slot, single-printed circuit board solution. Codenamed Hemlock, the card was initially named 5870 X2, a designation that was reportedly scrapped in favor of the name HD 5970.

Alienbabeltech has leaked what may be the first images of the new card and it looks to be a beast in every way. Measuring 13.5 inches (34.29 cm) long, the prototype 5970 has no reason to feel insecure -- after all, it's endowed with presumably the longest PCB on a mass-produced graphics card to date. It's reportedly a struggle to fit the card inside even full size tower cases like the Antec 1200. It is unknown if these dimensions will carry over to the production card.

The leaked card was perhaps running the leaked Catalyst 9.11 drivers, as the version number in CPU-Z was listed as 8.14.10.708 for the Direct3D driver, versus 8.14.10.700 on Catalyst 9.10. Benchmarks showing the card trouncing the NVIDIA GTX 295 in performance were aired then quickly removed at AMD's request. If these benchmarks holds true, it appears that AMD will wrest the title of having the most powerful single-card solution, at least temporarily, from NVIDIA.

View: Article @ Source Site