Enjoying your top-of-the-line GeForce GTX 295? Well sorry fellas, that card is no longer the best, with ATI claiming the top spot with their new HD 5970 dual-GPU beast. The card boasts an amazing 4.64 TFLOPs of power thanks to 4.3 billion 40nm transistors on the single PCB. The card packs what appears to be mixed specs between the HD 5850 and HD 5870: a 750MHz core clock, 3200 stream processors and 2GB of GDDR5 running at 1GHz.
The card is also quite large, coming in at 30cm (12″) which is so large it should overhang the length of most ATX motherboards. The card also guzzles a fair bit of power – 294W while in full load and 50W while in idle – so you’d better have a pretty good PSU to accommodate this beast. The card comes loaded with two DVI ports and a DisplayPort with capabilities for a 3-display EyeFinity setup and DirectX 11.
On to the benchmarks from this card. In 3DMark Vantage, the HD 5970 shoots past all the other single card setups with an impressive GPU score of 11791 (compared to the GTX 295′s score of 8895), but fails to reach the performance of two HD 5870′s in Crossfire. In games, the HD 5970 also shoots past competitors, reaching 57FPS in Crysis all Very High settings, beating the 295 by 13FPS. In Far Cry 2 the 5970 also shot past competitors by ~25FPS, however in Left 4 Dead the GTX 295 just had the edge on the HD 5970. Overall though, the card shows itself to be the fastest on the market.
If you fancy getting one of these graphics cards, you can grab one now however it’s going to set you back around US$599, but it’s well worth it if you crave the sheer power the card will bring to your gaming rig. Our graphics card rankings list has been updated too, with the HD 5970 firmly in the top spot. We are still waiting on the GT300 cards from Nvidia though; maybe they’ll take the performance crown from ATI.
