Wednesday's launch of AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5970 marked the introduction of the most powerful graphics card in the DX11 realm to date. Finally, everyone got to see exactly how two Cypress cores on a single PCB would perform. Verdict? They perform just as expected, and that is a good thing. With an arsenal of DX11 games here or just around the corner, we don't have to play the year or two waiting game to enjoy the fruits of the latest DirectX. AMD's 'sweet spot' approach has given us three successive generations of dual GPU toys, first introduced with the 3870x2 and culminating with today's 4th generation dual GPU 5970. Of course, being Rage3D, we cannot omit mentioning the original Rage 128 Fury MAXX released back in 1999.

The 'sweet spot' strategy continues to pay off for AMD, making a midrange affordable chip ~$300 and scaling up and down to provide a full range of highly capable GPUs. Today we have the opportunity to review Sapphire's newest high-end dual GPU card, the HD5970 OC. Sapphire's 5970 brings a slight overclock to the table (10MHz core, 40MHz memory) while keeping under the 300w TDP. Complementing the OC moniker, the included bundle provides Redline voltage tweaking software that, combined with CCC's overclocking tools, will help you as you endeavor to overclock the beast into the stratosphere. We are pleased to give you an in-depth performance analysis of the world's fastest graphics card, that just got faster, the Sapphire HD 5970 Overclocked Edition.

Sapphire ATi Radeon HD5970

In this article, we go beyond our ATI Radeon HD5970 launch review, which covered the basic technologies introduced with Hemlock and provided a quick glimpse at the performance under the hood.  We ran the reference HD5970 through a small battery of tests, pitting it against its single GPU brethren, the HD5850 and HD5870, on our Core i7-920 test system.  Today, we change the landscape slightly, running the Sapphire HD5970 OC through a different suite of games, against a different set of competitors, and on a different test system.  Did we say slightly?  Oops!  The competition:

Before we move on, lets take a quick look at Sapphire's overclocked Hemlock.  On to the next page!