Today, the Radeon HD 5970, AMD's dual-GPU flagship graphics card, becomes the new GPU to beat, flooring the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 in a set of early benchmarks posted online. This comes in the form of confidential AMD presentation slides which show the Radeon HD 5970's performance in games at max resolution (2560x1600) and max settings compared with the GeForce GTX 295. The full specifications of the Radeon HD 5970 have also been revealed now, and it looks like it's going to be the ultimate graphics card money can buy for quite a while.
The Radeon HD 5970 comes in the wake of AMD's introduction of its newest Cypress GPUs, the HD 5850, HD 5870, HD 5750 and HD 5770. With the HD 5970 being the flagship model, AMD has equipped it with premium components and allowed it massive headroom for overclocking, which bring it even farther ahead of the competition in terms of performance.
Two high-grade AMD Cypress GPUs lie at the heart of the Radeon HD 5970, and it comes with GDDR5 memory clocked at just 1000MHz. The reason why it's OK to have the HD 5970's clock speeds lower than the single-GPU HD 5870 is because AMD has lifted limits on what the driver-level ATI Overdrive software can offer in terms of overclocking, so you can easily drive the clock speeds from the default 720MHz/1000MHz up to 1000/1500MHz.
It sounds like you're going to need very good cooling for that to work, but when it comes to board power draws nothing is out of the ordinary: 42w during idle and 294w during maximum load.
The Radeon HD 5970 isn't available anywhere in the Philippines right now but you can pre-order it through the right channels for about 35,000 Pesos, according to a source. Whether it is worth it or not is up to you to decide.
Sources: [TechPowerUp, donanimhaber]
