Radeon HD 5970 Single card and Crossfire review - Introduction

Behold the ATI Radeon HD 5970

All rise -- the Hemlock is here ! ATI's best kept secret ever *coughs* will be released today. Hey everybody and welcome to a nice feature length review on the latest dual-GPU offering from ATI. The gossip and well a carefully injected marketing strategy made sure everybody heard about the dual-GPU solution from ATI many moons before the initial release. It got you guys excited, curious and that most certainly did build a lot of momentum and hype surrounding this product release.

You know what, I would not have called the product Hemlock -- but bulldog ! It's time to unleash the beast. Today its released and obviously we'll have a look at this beast of graphics. It's pure adrenaline, pure muscle power and to date the fastest graphics card on the globe. And though clocked a little conservative .. this puppy can be tweaked into the stratosphere. Which we'll show you as well.

The highest of high-end gaming pleasure was labeled under the codename Hemlock, and when we seek up that phrase we'll learn that Hemlock is short for 'a poisonous plant, Conium maculatum, of the parsley family, having purple-spotted stems, finely divided leaves, and umbels of small white flowers, used medicinally as a powerful sedative'. Gods honest truth here. The codename matched the product really well -- but we like bulldog better ;)

So we are fortunate enough to have two Radeon HD 5970 samples in our LAB, the first a reference sample from ATI, the second a full retail sample from the folks at HIS. It's their Radeon HD 5970 Limited Edition. We'll put both to the test and since we have two -- we'll manage a little CrossfireX session with four GPUs as well.

Enough said in this introduction, have a peek at the latest and greatest DX11 class product on the globe, and then let's head onwards to the next page where we'll startup a lengthy review to go along with the sheer size of this card.

Next page my friend ...