Introduction

Earlier launched today, AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5970 is the company's new flagship graphics accelerator that intends to clinch the performance leadership crown off its competitor. Packing two of the industry's fastest GPUs codenamed AMD Cypress, 2 GB of GDDR5 memory, DirectX 11 support, and 3200 stream processors in its kitty, the HD 5970 is touted to be quite a monstrosity in itself. Make sure you find out more about the accelerator in solo, in our ASUS EAH5970 review first.

In this review, we paired two Radeon HD 5970 accelerators by HIS in a 4-way ATI CrossFireX setup. 4-way, since there are four physical GPUs working in tandem. It should give you an idea of what the setup that stands to be the best money can buy really offers. The findings of this review will also tell you how four AMD Cypress GPUs are able to upscale, and whether the amount of graphics processing power is relevant for today's applications.

Since the ASUS EAH5970 review already covered every aspect about the card, we will jump straight on to the performance figures. 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.

Package & Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics Card
• HIS iClear Card
• HIS Universal Screwdriver Tool
• CrossFire Bridge
• Driver CD + Documentation
• DVI to HDMI adapter, DVI to Analog Adapter, Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort Adapter
• 2x PCI-E power cable
• Dirt 2 Coupon (Steam required)

Test System

• All video card results were obtained on this exact system with the exact same configuration.
• All games were set to their highest quality setting

Each benchmark was tested at the following settings and resolution:

• 1024 x 768, No Anti-aliasing. This is a standard resolution without demanding display settings.
• 1280 x 1024, 2x Anti-aliasing. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens today (17" - 19"). A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.
• 1680 x 1050, 4x Anti-aliasing. Most common widescreen resolution on larger displays (19" - 22"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
• 1920 x 1200, 4x Anti-aliasing. Typical widescreen resolution for large displays (22" - 26"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
• 2560 x 1600, 4x Anti-aliasing. Highest possible resolution for commonly available displays (30"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.

We simulated the performance of the HD 5850 by taking our HD 5870, reducing the clock speeds and disabling two SIMDs, which results in exactly the same performance as HD 5850.