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The cards are supplied inside a ‘P90' shaped gun casing. A very creative idea from XFX and one we have never seen attempted before.
A lever is pulled on the underside which allows the shell to be opened. The XFX HD5970 BE LE 4GB is encased inside an antistatic bag with foam inserts on 3 of the sides.
Both cards removed from their P90 shipping containers.
Immediately the weight is noticeable, these are heavy duty graphics cards. The cooler is finished in a beautiful off black granite colour with intense red fan in the middle.
The fan looks great against the black shroud and for some reason we couldn't help thinking about the Ducati Senna Edition when we looked at this card. The fan glows red when it is powered up.
Who says video cards can't be works of art?
31 centimeters is hard to picture in your mind, so here is one of the cards next to an eVGA superclocked GTX460. Yes, its huge.
Removing the cooler is a straightforward, if slightly long process. Screws need to be removed at the rear of the card so we can get access to screws on the PCB. This PCB is 12 inches long and we can immediately see that the design is different to the reference ATI design – the GPU cores are slightly further apart. Each of the heatsinks on the cooler is a copper design which is connected to three copper heatpipes for a high level of heat removal.
Each of the limited edition cards has six mini displayport connectors as can be seen on the images above and these can work in conjunction with the supplied adapters to connect to a wealth of panels. for Eyefinity. The cards take 2 x 8 pin power connectors each which we had expected. They can obviously be hooked together for a CrossfireX configuration, which we will be doing today.
Above, GPUZ reporting a single card, then a dual card in our system (Crossfire X). The astute among you will notice that XFX have not only changed the appearance of the cards, but also the specifications. There are two 40nm Cypress cores with 1600 unifed shaders and 32 ROPS, but the core speed has been increased from 725mhz to 850mhz. This is a hell of an increase over the reference HD5970 design. The memory has also doubled, from 1GB for each core, to 2GB – totaling 4GB. XFX are using high grade Hynix chips which are clocked to 1200mhz, rather than 1000mhz. Support is true to the reference design HD5970 meaning 7.1 audio output, DX11, Shader Model 5.0, DirectCompute 5.0 and PCI Express 2.1.
good god. that is hilarious. Crysis playable at 5760×1080 at enthusiast :p
lol. Not much more to say to this review. those frame rates are the highest ive seen ever.
Crysis is impressive. it still runs like shit for me at 1920 🙂
Well tickle my tonsels. thats a credit card bill and a half for that system. how much, 5k for the rig ?
The ducati analogy is interesting. I laughed initially but you have a point and I get where you are coming from.
Sorry at the end of the day however, I couldn’t even begin to contemplate spending almost 2k on a Crossfire setup.
CPU £700, PSU £250, Memory £150, Graphics £1800, Case £250, Hard Drive £300. Cooler £100.
Lovely. liked the videos too, that memory is wicked, is that crucial ballistix tracer ?
Its £100 less than the ARES, so at least thats something.
Great cards and they look beautiful, much nicer than ARES imo. Isnt AMD’s new range coming out in a few months? surely makes these pretty much redundant now.
Gaming on these for a month would give a nice electricity bill. AX850 was getting warm? thats a serious output level.
How many of these are XFX making? 500 ?
The cost is so high probably to cover, or help cover the R&D by XFX. I can’t see them selling too many of these, id love to get sales figures, out of curiousity.
i love these cards, but I couldn’t afford anything close to this. I saw a great review of this on hardware heaven too a few weeks ago.
@ Robert – yeah it would heat up the house, so you might save money long term. not sure of the overall output, I just measured the cards.
@ Brad – yes , ballistix tracer – great memory and very underrated, ive had those to 2ghz.
@ Sam – I dont think any of us would spend 1800 on a system like this, well Id love to, but im just like you guys, a pauper 😉
@ Joe – I haven’t read it, but I am sure it is good, Stuart is one of the best reviewers on the net.
@ Melted Cheese Tech – I honestly have no idea of the amount of cards produced in this range, I wouldn’t say very many. ill find out if I can.
@ Trevor – I don’t think your scenario just relates to Graphics cards, but yes a new range of cards, not long away.
Ok I just called XFX, they only made 1000 of these, worldwide. quite a limited run.
Very nice, apart from the noise ratings. crazy performance.
… hmmm…
If I win euro millions, I might consider setup like this… 😀
the toys of the rich and famous. if only 🙂
Those are really sexy looking cards – love the colours. they seem rather loud, but its part of the trade off for ultimate performance.
very nice, wouldnt make me much of a better gamer however, I suck 🙂
I have been saving up for one of these since it was announced, almost have the money now, but it will probably all be gone by the time I get it together 🙁
Very nice performance to say the least. It seems totally overkill for what most people need, but hell if you have three monitors and a core i7 970 or 980x, SSD, 1200W psu, why the hell not ? 🙂
On the benchmark reviews on haven the person says that a nvidia 460 overclocked gets 30 fps average? i scored 68 fps with sli’ed 260 1 year old videocards. DX11 in this benchmark test is backwards compatible so that is with a dx 11 render… So I question the validity of that statement — “For comparison, an overclocked GTX460 scores an average of 37.1 fps. Scaling in Crossfire X is very good with the average frame rate jumping from 62.6 to 114.3 when another card is added. On a side note, we expect to see Tesselation improving with the new range of ATI cards.”
With that said, my minimum fps was 10 fps higher then the minimum fps logged on those bench tests. So your buying overhead fps ;(.