14 DAY TRIAL // When Sapphire's CeBIT 2010 lineup was summarily introduced last week, there was a certain pair of products among all the laptops, projectors, motherboards and graphics cards that seemed to stand out amongst the others. Those two were an Eyefinity6 version of HD 5870 and a very powerful version of the ATI Radeon HD 5970 dual-GPU adapter. Now that CeBIT is underway, Fudzilla was able to take a closer look at the Sapphire HD 5970 OC 4 GB.
Naturally, the card is a non-reference design that has two fully functional Cypress graphics processing units running at clock speeds superior to those of the stock model. These two GPUs are each paired with not 1GB but 2GB of VRAM, which means that the complete product has a total of 4GB of memory. The original HD 5970 had the two cores running at 725MHz and the memory clock set at 1000MHz. Sapphire's card, on the other hand, has the graphics processor clocked at 850MHz and the memory running at 1200Mhz.
The reason why Advanced Micro Devices chose to tone down its HD 5970's clock speeds was because it was faced with power constraints. To circumvent this issue, and, at the same time, turn the card into a real power-hungry beast, Sapphire gave its model two 8-pin power connectors. As for video output, the new device has a mini DisplayPort connector and two DVI-D ports.
In order to ensure that its product does not suffer instant death as a consequence of overheating, Sapphire has outfitted it with a cooling module developed by Arctic Cooling. With the cooler installed, the entire product is three slots thick, which means that end-users will need a rather large motherboard and an equally spacious chassis to accommodate even a single such device. Of course, the OC in the product's name itself, HD 5970 OC 4 GB, suggests that overclockers are the target consumer base for this creature.
Of course, the card's price alone, though unknown, will most likely limit the number of sales. Unfortunately, it is still unknown when this product will become available, although it will have to compete against a similar device from ASUS, ROG ARES.