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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
The XFX HD 5970 Black Edition Limited cards arrive in a package which we initially mistook for being a chassis. In the image above you can see it next to the large Corsair AX750 PSU box. Huge is an understatement.
Inside this box is a very cool Gaming Lan Bag from G8, a specialist company who deal with gaming clothing and accessories. This particular model is obviously branded with XFX logos. You certainly won't be carrying your graphics card around in it on a regular basis but it can easily fit a massive amount of accessories for your LAN tournaments. There are three pouches on the front which contain various bundled items.
The first pouch contains codes for both Colin McRae Dirt 2 and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. There are also some stickers, a do not disturb sign and a metal case badge which is very pretty.
The box in the second pouch contains literature, a Crossfire Connector and a driver CD.
The final box contains the most important items – a wealth of mini Displayport convertors for connection to DVI screens (3), Displayport screens (3), and HDMI (1).
Above, some final shots of the XFX branded Lan Bags from G8. If you see two of these on your table then be sure not to check for the £1,800 credit card bill next month.
The cards are supplied inside a ‘P90' shaped gun casing. A very creative idea from XFX and one we have never seen attempted before.
A lever is pulled on the underside which allows the shell to be opened. The XFX HD5970 BE LE 4GB is encased inside an antistatic bag with foam inserts on 3 of the sides.
Both cards removed from their P90 shipping containers.
Immediately the weight is noticeable, these are heavy duty graphics cards. The cooler is finished in a beautiful off black granite colour with intense red fan in the middle.
The fan looks great against the black shroud and for some reason we couldn't help thinking about the Ducati Senna Edition when we looked at this card. The fan glows red when it is powered up.
Who says video cards can't be works of art?
31 centimeters is hard to picture in your mind, so here is one of the cards next to an eVGA superclocked GTX460. Yes, its huge.
Removing the cooler is a straightforward, if slightly long process. Screws need to be removed at the rear of the card so we can get access to screws on the PCB. This PCB is 12 inches long and we can immediately see that the design is different to the reference ATI design – the GPU cores are slightly further apart. Each of the heatsinks on the cooler is a copper design which is connected to three copper heatpipes for a high level of heat removal.
Each of the limited edition cards has six mini displayport connectors as can be seen on the images above and these can work in conjunction with the supplied adapters to connect to a wealth of panels. for Eyefinity. The cards take 2 x 8 pin power connectors each which we had expected. They can obviously be hooked together for a CrossfireX configuration, which we will be doing today.
Above, GPUZ reporting a single card, then a dual card in our system (Crossfire X). The astute among you will notice that XFX have not only changed the appearance of the cards, but also the specifications. There are two 40nm Cypress cores with 1600 unifed shaders and 32 ROPS, but the core speed has been increased from 725mhz to 850mhz. This is a hell of an increase over the reference HD5970 design. The memory has also doubled, from 1GB for each core, to 2GB – totaling 4GB. XFX are using high grade Hynix chips which are clocked to 1200mhz, rather than 1000mhz. Support is true to the reference design HD5970 meaning 7.1 audio output, DX11, Shader Model 5.0, DirectCompute 5.0 and PCI Express 2.1.
For our testing today we are using three ilyama screens which output 1920×1080. We reviewed the E2472 HDD screen last month and we feel it offers a high level of image quality for a very modest asking price.
These screens can be picked up for £165 inc vat each, so for under £500 you can enjoy gaming at 5760×1080. If you can afford the two XFX cards on test today, this would be an ideal configuration with only a minimal additional outlay. These screens are LED based too, so they are very thin.
Configuring EyeFinity is a straightforward process available in the Catalyst Control Center. You set up the panels as a ‘display group' by creating this group via a series of prompts.
We have covered this before last month in our Sapphire FLEX review so if you want a step by step guide, please visit this page.
To test these cards we need the fastest system possible, and that is what we are using, based on an Intel Core i7 970 6 core CPU overclocked to 4.33ghz. It is worth pointing out that we needed to remove the drive bays from our Lian Li 8FIB to fit the cards into the chassis.
We initially used a Corsair AX850 power supply for the review, but we noticed it was running very hot, so we upgraded it to the Corsair AX1200W model which made for a much happier system.
Test System:
XFX Radeon HD 5970 Black Edition Limited 4GB x 2
Processor: Intel Core i7 970 clocked to 4.33ghz – Verification here
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Tracer 6GB @1800mhz
Thermal Paste: Noctua HT H1
Cooler: Coolit Vantage (Extreme Setting)
Motherboard: MSI X58A-GD65
Chassis: Lian Li 8GIB
Hard Drive: OCZ Agility 2 120GB
Monitors: ilyama x 3 / LaCie 730 30 inch screen / Panasonic NeoPDP 600hz Viera
Technical Equipment:
Keithley Integra unit
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter (6-130dBa)
Software:
Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate Edition
Forceware Driver 260.52
Catalyst 10.9 beta
FRAPS Professional
GPU Z
CPU Z
Furmark
Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.1
3DMark Vantage
Resident Evil 5
Crysis Warhead
Metro 2033
Tom Clancy H.A.W.X.
Left4Dead2
HQV Benchmark 2.1
All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests all games across five closely matched runs and averages out the results to get an accurate median figure. This is not an exact science, but we perform multiple runs to try and eliminate any abnormalities.
Our minimum frame rate game graphs have three main zones. These are sampled over a specific 30 interval period of time and then mapped into a chart. These are handy reference guides to detail worst case performance of the product being reviewed. When we test video cards we try to find the best combination of resolution and image quality settings while still maintaining playable frame rates.
Over 30fps is the zone most people want at all times, this means perfectly smooth frame rates with no hitching.
Between 30fps and 25fps is the KitGuru ‘Playable’ zone, although some people might notice occasional stuttering in specific scenes.
Under 25fps is classed as the KitGuru ‘Danger Zone’ which means that the game experience will be less than impressive. Settings and/or resolution would need lowered to help smooth out the frame rate.
Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.
Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.
Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:
- Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
- Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
- Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
- Multicore CPU support
- Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
- Powerful C++ API
- Comprehensive performance profiling system
- Flexible XML-based data structures
While the XFX cards today will handle this at 2560×1600 we always run this specific benchmark at 1080p so it is easy to compare performance against any other card we have reviewed on KitGuru.
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.
HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evalute motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection.
There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on Bluray. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content so will we.
This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis.
Read our initial analysis over here.
|
XFX HD 5970 Black Edition Limited 4GB
|
|
|
Dial
|
4
|
| Dial with static pattern | 5 |
| Gray Bars | 5 |
| Violin | 5 |
| Stadium 2:2 | 5 |
| Stadium 3:2 | 5 |
| Horizontal Text Scroll | 5 |
| Vertical Text Scroll | 5 |
| Transition to 3:2 Lock | 5 |
| Transition to 2:2 Lock | 0 |
|
2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video
|
5 |
|
2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video
|
5 |
|
3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed
|
5 |
|
5:5 FPS Animation
|
5 |
|
6:4 12 FPS Animation
|
5 |
|
8:7 8 FPS Animation
|
5 |
|
Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP)
|
5 |
|
Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE)
|
5 |
|
Random Noise: Sailboat
|
5 |
|
Random Noise: Flower
|
5 |
|
Random Noise: Sunrise
|
5 |
|
Random Noise: Harbour Night
|
5 |
|
Scrolling Text
|
5 |
|
Roller Coaster
|
5 |
|
Ferris Wheel
|
5 |
|
Bridge Traffic
|
5 |
|
Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text
|
5 |
|
Roller Coaster
|
5 |
|
Ferris Wheel
|
5 |
|
Bridge Traffic
|
5 |
|
Luminance Frequency Bands
|
5 |
|
Chrominance Frequency Bands
|
5 |
| Vanishing Text | 5 |
|
Resolution Enhancement
|
15 |
|
Theme Park
|
5 |
| Driftwood | 5 |
|
Ferris Wheel
|
5 |
|
Skin Tones
|
7 |
| Total | 196 |
It is worth pointing out again that HQV Benchmark 2.0 is not an exact science, the testing is subjective. While many people will be using a panel or television with heavy processing, we have attempted to negate this by using one of the most expensive panels on the market with a very wide gamut and colour depth. This ensures that the output from the hardware, via the driver to the panel is clean and pure. We also studied reference documentation from the creators of the benchmark to educate ourselves on all the tests beforehand. Knowing exactly what you are looking for is tantamount to ensuring you can accurately measure the results.
196 points is an excellent score and this is up 3 points since we last tested Catalyst drivers with other high end hardware. We will hopefully be updating our findings with a variety of hardware and the latest AMD and Nvidia drivers at the end of the year.
Ah, Crysis – one of the most talked about games of all time. An engine that brought even bad ass systems to their knees when it was released and one which divided opinion between the gaming community. Was it a truly a masterpiece ahead of its time? You decide.
Today we are testing at 5760×1080 with Enthusiast settings. Yes, you read it right.
The single XFX HD5970 Black Edition 4GB easily outperforms the reference HD5970 although at these settings it is still not playable. Lowering settings to gamer helps but its still not playable throughout. In Crossfire X these settings really come to life with an extra 10-15fps on the average frame rates. Scaling in Crysis isn't wonderful, but slotting in another card certainly helps. At least we know now much we need to spend on graphics cards to get Crysis playable at 5760×1080 with enthusiast settings … just over £1,800.
The makers of Metro 2033 – 4A Games was founded by people who split off from GSC Game World a year before the release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, in particular Oles’ Shiskovtsov and Aleksandr Maksimchuk, the programmers who worked on the development of X-Ray engine used in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. The game utilizes multi-platform 4A Engine, running on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Microsoft Windows. There is some contention regarding whether the engine is based on the pre-release X-Ray engine (as claimed by Sergiy Grygorovych, the founder of GSC Game World, as well as users who have seen the 4A Engine SDK screenshots, citing visual similarities, shared resources, and technical evaluation of the pre-release 4A Engine demo conducted at the request of GSC Game World), or whether the engine is an original development (as claimed by 4A Games and Oles’ Shiskovtsov in particular, who claims it would have been impractical to retrofit the X-ray engine with console support). 4A Engine features Nvidia PhysX support, enhanced AI, and a console SDK for Xbox 360. The PC version includes exclusive features such as DirectX 11 support and has been described as “a love letter to PC gamers” because of the developers’ choice to “make the PC version [especially] phenomenal”.
We set up various resolutions and configurations in DX11 mode to find out what was playable … as this engine is extremely demanding.
At 4800×900 with AAA enabled, 4x AF on and settings on HIGH we managed to get the game playable at 4800×900 with two XFX BE HD5970's in CFx. In single card mode the game was juddery in many of the sections and we wouldn't class this as playable. The single reference HD5970 was utterly unplayable at these settings dropping into single digits in a few of the test environments.
Tom Clancy HAWX is set in the same universe as Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter; as Captain Scott Mitchell, the Ghost leader, is featured in a few missions of the missions. Plot elements are carried over from other Tom Clancy games such as the missile defense system found in Tom Clancy’s EndWar. G4′s interview with H.A.W.X’s lead designer Thomas Simon reveals that the game takes place in between Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 and Tom Clancy’s EndWar.
The player begins the game in 2014 as the player assumes the role of former U.S. Air Force pilot, David Crenshaw, who is part of an elite unit called H.A.W.X (“High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron”), provides fire-support missions for the Ghost team carrying out covert operations in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. However, shortly after the mission, the Air Force decides to deactivate the H.A.W.X squadron and its pilots, including Crenshaw, are recruited into the PMC Artemis Global Security.
We are testing : DX 10.1 with shadows high, sun shafts high, ambient occlusion (SSAO) very high. view distance high, forest high, environment high, texture quality high, HDR on, Engine heat on and DOF on.
H.A.W.X. looks great on all the graphics solutions today, with even the reference 5970 powering through the engine without a problem. When we move to the dual card XFX configuration the frame rates go through the roof .. our system thankfully isn't limiting the performance.
Left 4 Dead 2 is a cooperative first-person shooter game. It is the sequel to Valve Corporation’s award-winning Left 4 Dead. The game launched on November 17, 2009, for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360 in the United States; it launched November 20 in Europe. It builds upon the cooperatively-focused gameplay of the original and uses Valve’s proprietary Source engine, the same game engine used in Left 4 Dead. The game made its world premiere at E3 2009 with a trailer during the Microsoft press event.
In a similar fashion to the original, Left 4 Dead 2 is set during the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic, and focuses on four survivors fighting against hordes of the infected. The survivors must fight their way through levels, interspersed with safe houses that act as checkpoints, with the goal of reaching a rescue vehicle at the campaign’s finale.
The gameplay is procedurally altered by an artificial intelligence engine dubbed the “Director” that monitors the players’ performance and adjust the scenario to provide a dynamic challenge. Several new features have been introduced: new types of infected, melee weapons, and a story-arc that connects the game’s five campaigns together.
We are testing this at 8AA with 16AF at 5760×1080 – all settings cranked to the limits.
Left 4 Dead 2's Source engine isn't one of the most taxing and even at these insane settings, the XFX solutions were able to deliver some seriously impressive frame rates – two of them delivering an average frame of just under 150fps. Staggering.
Mafia II is a gritty drama which chronicles the rise of World War II veteran Vito Scaletta, the son of Sicilian immigrants. As the game progresses, Vito will join the Falcone Crime Family and become a made man. There are 15 chapters in the game, connected into one storyline.
We tested at 5760×1080 with fullscreen: on, antialiasing: off, Anisotrophic filtering: 16x – all other settings maxed.
Mafia 2 runs very well on these cards, even at 5760×1080 allowing us to set everything to the limits in game. The CFx performance of the XFX cards is staggering, achieving an average frame rate of 124fps. We noticed some slight performance drops with two cards from time to time, meaning there is assuredly more driver enhancements to come from AMD.
Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (known as Dirt 2 outside Europe and stylised, DiRT) is a racing game released in September 2009, and is the sequel to Colin McRae: Dirt. This is the first game in the McRae series since McRae’s death in 2007. It was announced on 19 November 2008 and features Ken Block, Travis Pastrana, Tanner Foust, and Dave Mirra. The game includes many new race-events, including stadium events. Along with the player, an RV travels from one event to another, and serves as ‘headquarters’ for the player. It features a roster of contemporary off-road events, taking players to diverse and challenging real-world environments. The game takes place across four continents: Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. The game includes five different event types: Rally, Rallycross, ‘Trailblazer,’ ‘Land Rush’ and ‘Raid.’ The World Tour mode sees players competing in multi-car and solo races at new locations, and also includes a new multiplayer mode.
This engine support DX11 and was one of the integral releases for ATI when they launched the 5xxx series cards a while ago. Hardware tessellation is used on the crowd, as well as water and cloth objects. DirectCompute 11 accelerated high definition ambient occulsion is also integrated with full floating point high dynamic range lighting.
We performing testing at 5760×1080 with 8AA and ultra settings.
The Black Edition cards are really able to power through this game at these insane settings and we are very impressed to see decent scaling at this resolution with two cards added. The real world benefits aren't that noticeable however, a single card is capable of handling this engine. The reference HD5970 board trails the pack with minimum frame rates around 35.
Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.
We had hoped today that we could break the 40,000 barrier with these two cards running at Peformance settings. This may not sound significant to the record holders right now, but remember this is a system with modest cooling – we aren't using LN2 here, just a Coolit Vantage.
We were extremely happy to beat our chosen goal of 40,000k in 3DMark Vantage – reaching the top couple of percent of users on Futuremark's ORB with a final score of 42,171 or 43,100 directly via the graphics card. The compare result is available here if you wish to have a look directly.
This is the first time we have seen over 20,000 rendered frames in Graphics Test 2 – New Calico. We have included a video of this below. Skip to the last few seconds if you just want to see the final rendered frame result. The noise in the background is the system on the floor beside us, but more on this later.
Overclocking today is handled by the latest version of Afterburner and both cards recorded exactly the same overclock of 905mhz on the core and 1290mhz on the memory (from 805 core/1200 memory). This is a very nice clock increase, especially when considering the cards are already supplied in an overclocked state.
We then retested our overclock with a few of the game engines.
The clock increases helped the cards generate another 3-4 fps over the ‘out of the box settings' in Crysis Warhead. Next we will try Metro 2033.
With the clocks set in our manual overclocked state, Metro 2033 was pushed by another 2 fps in both minimum and average zones. Lastly we had a rerun of Colin McRae Dirt 2.
Dirt performance was increased by around 4 frame per second at 5760×1080 which wasn't noticeable at all under real world conditions.
The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 25c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this. These results are taken with the system built inside the Lian Li 8GIB Chassis.
Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test.
Our temperatures show that XFX have managed to improve on the reference design with their custom PCB and cooling solution. Despite the large overclocked settings, the cards run cooler than the reference HD5970 . This is particularly noticeable when running Furmark as the ATI board would peak around 90c whereas the XFX solutions were running 8c cooler.
Recently we have changed our method of measuring noise levels. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. We are using a heatpipe based passive power supply and an Intel SSD to keep noise levels to a minimum. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests. Ambient noise in the room is around 20 dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.
Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.
For this review, we couldn't use the passively cooled power supply, however we turned off the case fans to try and achieve a reasonably accurate sound sample of the HD5970 cards.
KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum
All of these cards are clearly audible, even when idle, with our noise meter reading under around 50db. Under full load, they can get very loud indeed, with two of them registering around 60dBa.
Although including a video from a camera is hardly scientific, we felt it was worth seeing (hearing)!
To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. The best way to get maximum load results is by using Furmark, and even though it is not indicative of a real world situation it shows the limits the card can theoretically demand. The ‘gaming’ results are measured when playing Crysis Warhead and is a more valuable result to take from this.
Now at least we know why the Corsair AX850W was running very hot when trying to power a system with two XFX Black Edition HD5970s boards in CFX. The cards alone are taking around 592 watts when running Furmark. 408watts when gaming is not that bad however considering the staggering performance levels. It is worth noting that the XFX cards consume slightly less power than the ATI reference board. Clearly a well designed product from XFX.
If you have read the review then you will assuredly already be salivating by now. There is however one caveat, the asking price of £916 inc vat, per card. Can XFX justify the price? Let us discuss this.
It is clear from the moment you open the box that XFX have went ‘all out' to create a unique concept piece. The specially numbered P90 gun casing for instance (which matches the card number) is a clear indication that what you have in your hands is unlikely to be repeated anytime soon. We also really like the Gaming LAN Bag from G8 which adds value to the package, especially with the Limited Edition XFX branding. The collection of cables is also a worthy addition and one that most people are going to need, unless of course they have a plethora of Displayport enabled monitors at home. There are two free games and a Crossfire connector as well, so all the bases, then some, are covered.
Obviously the bundle isn't going to justify the price tag, so we have to look at the card itself. This is a custom designed model by the XFX engineers and it looks simply stunning – we made the statement earlier that it looks like a work of art, and we feel in the boring world of graphics cards that it could be compared to a Limited Edition Ducati Motorbike. The build quality is exceptional and no corners have been cut in any area.
On a performance level the card(s) really deliver the goods, a single Black Edition can power through almost every engine on the market at 5670×1080 with AA and eye candy cranked to the hilt. Two of them in Crossfire X is a stunningly powerful system and we broke 43,000 in 3DMark Vantage at performance settings which is a staggering result for a modestly cooled gaming system. When compared directly to the reference HD5970, these cards are not only clocked much higher, but they also run significantly cooler as well. Power consumption has also been reduced with the custom XFX design, always a good thing to note.
Negatively, the noise levels are bordering on almost painful, particularly with two running in a Crossfire X configuration. We recorded around 60dBa under full load and we would suggest a high end chassis with good soundproofing if these cards are going to be the foundation for your next system.
This leads us right back to the pricing, and of course this is something we can't justify, but to be perfectly honest it is a moot point. People who buy these cards aren't that worried about money, nor are they wanting something ‘mainstream' which everyone else has. There is no doubt in my mind that the XFX Radeon HD 5970 Black Edition Limited 4GB cards are a stunning showcase of engineering prowess and fall into the category of technologically based works of art. They propel XFX majestically into the ultra high end showcase category, recorded in the annals of tech history with other companies such as ASUS, for their ARES.
KitGuru says: If you have a few grand spare and already have the partnering equipment to fully utilise these cards, then why not? We class these as ‘must have' products if you are a rich enthusiast user – numbered collectors items are always popular with this small user base. Let's just say it loud and clear, running a pair of these Radeon HD 5970 cards in CrossFire X formation will give you the fastest graphics solution we have ever seen.
