AMD ATI Radeon HD 5970 Review

Where to buy your ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics card

Now that ATI has launched its super-fast, dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970 graphics cards, let’s see who’s got stock and where you can get your card from. We asked the five biggest ATI partners to show us what they have to offer and tell us where you can buy their cards.

We’ll go through the various manufacturers in alphabetical order to avoid cries of favouritism, so if you can’t find your favourite manufacturer on this page, turn over to the next. We’ve published this article with estimated prices (before launch) and the manufacturer’s suggested retailers.

Finally, a big thank you to all the people at these companies that helped us out with this article at very short notice.

Asus EAH5970/G/2DIS/2GD5

Manufacturer’s Site: Asus

Asus’ card has the exclusive Voltage Tweak app, that can overvolt as well as overclock your GPU; Asus claims a performance ‘increase of up to 31 per cent’ from this. However, it seems all the other manufacturers have seen our Asus HD 5870 Voltage Tweak review as pretty much everyone has an application to overvolt their GPU now.

Asus bundles a key for Colin McRae: Dirt 2 with its card, which makes sense as it’s probably the first DX11 game that any of us will care about, as well as the usual Asus Splendid, Gamer OSD and Smart Doctor applications. Apart from that, the card is a reference design with clock speeds of 725MHz for the two GPUs and 1GHz (4GHz effective) for the 2GB of memory. The Asus stick resembles carbon fibre, but the cooler is the reference design and as such the card measures 11.5in 12.2in long.


Estimated UK Price: TBC
Suggested Reseller(s): Overclockers, Scan

HIS Radeon HD 5970

Manufacturer’s Site: HIS

HIS keeps to the Excalibur design for its HD 5970 card, and twins the idea of a massive sword with that long and thin box. At the usual 11.5in 12.2in long, we wonder just how much longer Arthur's actual sword was. HIS has some Merlin-esque magic in the box though – the card comes with an iClear expansion card. This fairly simple-looking PCI-E 1x card aims to clean up the power delivery to the card, and reducing electrical noise.

The card acts as a dampener for any kind of expansion card – GeForce or Radeon, sound card or TV tuner – and we can’t wait to get our hands on one to see if we can tell the difference. This bundle is a limited edition, however, and HIS uses the reference cooler and clock speeds of 725MHz for the two GPUs and 1GHz (4GHz effective) for the 2GB of GDDR5 memory.

The usual HIS ‘gamer’s tool kit’ is also inside, which gives you a basic multi-tool screwdriver thingy which might come in handy when removing your old card and installing this shiny new 11.5in one. You could also use it to re-act scenes from the Escape from Butcher Bay, but we’d suggest not – it’s probably not big enough. As with the other HD 5970 cards, the HIS comes with an activation code for Colin McRae: Dirt 2, the first note-worthy DX11 game.


Estimated UK Price: £490 (inc. VAT)
Suggested Reseller(s): HIS is selling HD 5970 cards exclusively through Novatech