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Imagine for a moment that you were a multi millionaire and had no limits when it came to budgeting for your gaming rig. Well, today we hope to take you on a trip down fantasy lane as we look at not one, but two of the XFX Radeon HD 5970 Black Edition Limited 4GB cards – Number 021 and Number 022. Would you love to be in a position to budget over £1,800 for just the graphics cards? Yeah we thought so, join the club.
At 31 cm long the XFX HD 5970 Black Edition Limited 4GB gives the word ‘beast' a whole new meaning. Today we are going to look at the performance of both cards in a variety of synthetic benchmarks and real world gaming situations. We also have a personal goal to achieve – KitGuru wants to break 40,000 in 3DMark Vantage at Performance settings.
Key Features
- 4GB GDDR5 memory
- ATI Eyefinity6 Edition
- Supports up to six panels via ATI Eyefinity technology (1, 3)
- Supports up to 7680 x 3200 resolutions in Single Large Surface (SLS) Mode or up to 2560 x 1600 per output.
- Windows 7 support
- ATI Stream technology (2)
- Designed for DirectCompute 11 and OpenCL
- Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT) (2,4)
- Compliant with DirectX® 11 and earlier revisions
- Supports OpenGL 3.2
- 40 nm Process technology
- ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance (5)
- ATI Avivo™ HD video and display technology (6,7)
- Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay™ technology (6)
- 6x Mini-DisplayPorts
- PCI Express® 2.1 support
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 ;(.