ATI HD 5970 Review - PAGE 17

Operating Temperatures

We used the program OCCT to measure 'load' temperatures once 200 seconds elapsed.

Vapor chamber or no, the HD 5970 puts out a lot of heat when things are really pushed to the edge. Don't expect it to reach such toasty in normal operation though -- for the time being, not many games strain the video card too much.

Nonetheless, 'non-reference cooler' comes to mind when looking at these results.

Power Usage

We used a Kill-o-Watt measuring device in conjunction with the program OCCT to measure 'load' temperatures once 200 seconds elapsed.

The load power usage seems reasonably (high) for the performance of the video card. Even at 40nm a great deal of power is needed to keep those billions of transistors firing on all cylinders.

In our chats with AMD, they made much out of the extremely low idle power state. In our testing, we just didn't see it. Don't get us wrong -- the idle is great, but it is not ground-breakingly low; just compare it to the GTX 295 above.

With the HD 5970, you can either connect two 6 pin PCIE power connectors, or one 6 pin and one 8 pin PCIE connector. If you want to overclock, you'll need the 8 pin PCIE connected.

Once again, with all powerful gaming cards such as this, you'll want the right PSU for the job. A well made 650W PSU or above is recommended here. If you run it on much less you might be pushing things.
 

Conclusion

Like the HD 5870, the HD 5970 is in the enviable position of not having much competition. That being said though, we thought the GTX 295 held up pretty well against it; certainly the HD 5970 is the new king of the block, but the GTX 295 is able to keep up -- this is could arguably be the better state of the SLI drivers as  opposed to the Catalyst CrossFire drivers, which typically take longer to mature.

For the lucky ones who may have a monster video card lying under their Christmas tree this year, if you want top-of-the-line, top-tier performance than the strongest option is the HD 5890. While the GTX 295 still holds up in the benchmarks, as we recommended in our recent HD 5870 reviews, we feel that it is best to stick with ATI for the moment because of DirectX 11 (which promises to really materialize into something, unlike DX10) and Eyefinity is nice feature to have as well.

Let's talk about prices for a bit. As a typical high-end monster-card introductory price, the HD 5970 sells for $600 USD. This is steep, but a fair price for the state of video card right now. Almost all HD 5000 series cards, and most Nvidia high-end cards (GTX 260 and above), are in short supply. So don't expect prices to fall any time soon. Some previous dual-GPU monster cards entered the market at a time when you could buy the equivalent pair of video cards and do your own multi-GPU setup (i.e buying a pair of HD 3870s when the HD 3870 X2 came out) but this isn't the case here. We expect HD 5000 prices to remain stable -- even possibly for a month or two after the launch of Nvidia's new generation, which is rumored not be coming in big volumes until the end of January.  $600 may seem high but this is a fair price as far as supply and demand dictates.

We felt that perhaps the HD 5970 was a touch on the underclocked side. Unfortunately our guess would be that many users out there (none of us of course) will not investigate the overclocking ability of this video card, so, for those people, they'll have a HD 5970 that is only running at %80-%85 of it's safe potential clock speeds. If you get this card, you must, must overclock it. It is underclocked out of the box (to benefit power consumption). No need to push it to the limit like we did in our O/C testing, but at least add 15% to the clocks to get yourself playing games in top-gear.  

On the other hand of the overclocking coin, the HD 5970 is such a powerful card offering such great performance that there isn't all that much that will really strain the video card, in the way of games, out just yet regardless. But rest assured 2010's crop of games will no doubt be taxing this video card well before Blizzard puts out there next game.

If you want top-end, no-joke performance right now, then there is only one option really:  the HD 5970.