AMD’s Radeon HD5970 Hemlock – Is Wickedly Fast

Not too long ago AMD took the lead in the GPU world, it was not a massive performance lead at first. No, it was merely a simple yet massively important move. This was the move to 40nm. This move was the opening move a new game of chess between AMD and their rivals, nVidia, and it spelled out something that was either overlooked or ignored.

The company wasn’t afraid of jumping the gun to the latest process note, and just as AMD skipped 65nm and went from 80nm to 55nm for their Radeon 3800 series, AMD worked in secrecy to push out a new generation of GPUs on TSMC’s new 40nm process. These would become the 5800 series – the first DirectX 11 GPUs in the world. The 5800 series also brought the speed crown back to AMD. For the first time in a long time AMD did not sit back and wait. Instead they forged ahead and are now pushing out the fastest single card on the planet. This comes to you in the form of the Dual 5870 GPU card, formerly known as Hemlock. AMD decided to change the name from the expected 5870X2 and instead named the product ATI Radeon HD 5970. We took one of these for a quick spin and are eager to tell you about it.

New and Improved
The 5970 represents an improvement over previous generations of “X2” cards. For starters, AMD has [like nVidia] moved away from the X2 designation and we would expect to see AMD’s CPU’s ditching the X2/X3/X4 nomenclature. They have also changed some things under the hood as well. For starters they approached the 5970 like they should; it is an enthusiasts’ card after all and deserves a little more attention. Ultimately, AMD developed a product in a 300Watt envelope [8+6-pin + PCIe x16 slot] but knowing that it would be pushed beyond this by many gamers they made sure it was capable of taking a 400Watt load. In fact, in a conversation with Devon Nekechuk, Product Manager for Hemlock and Jay Marsden, PR Manager for Graphics at AMD; we were carefully explained that while they have designed it to run at 400Watts they have not validated it and that running it at that spec will overdraw the PCIe specifications. If you have a top-of-the-class PSU that allows Amperage overdraw [check out some overclocking forums for these ones, we know that the Silverstone Zeus 1200W is one of those “golden babies”, Ed.] In fact, AMD told us that the highest successful current draw was massive 450W but that is probably in the domain of LN2 cooling and gunning for world’s fastest 3DMark scores.

To overcome this thermal challenge AMD resorted to cherry picking the ASICs that go on each of these cards to get the highest speed bins [tested for leakage and speed], have thrown on Volterra programmable digital power regulators, real time power management features, crazy expensive ceramic “SuperCapacitors” and GDDR5 that is rated at 5Gbps. They also improved the cooling by using the vapor chamber on full length of the card to allow it to handle up to a 400Watt heat load. The ATI Radeon HD 4870X2 came with only a small vapor chamber cooler on the GPU0, while the GPU1 used regular copper cooler. With Hemclock, AMD really did their homework and have put together what looks like a highly overclockable card. In fact they refer to it as “Unlocked”. Due to time constraints we were not able to run any overclocking tests on our 5970 but will be following up with a deeper look into overclocking, power and heat with this new card.

Speaking of power AMD has not forgotten you there. As we mentioned they designed the HD5970 with a 300Watt envelope this means that at stock speeds under 100% load it should not pull more than about 275-285 Watts at 23 Amps. When the card does not need to pull this much juice from the wall it is capable of actually shutting down one of the GPUs by putting it into a sleep state. This handy little feature brings the idle power draw down to about 42Watts. This reduction in power [and current] draw makes for longer product life.

One other improvement that is very welcome is that you no longer have to force Crossfire on the card. With the old 4870 X2 and 4850 X2 you had to enable Crossfire on the card to make sure you were using both GPUs. Yes with later revisions of the driver it would do it automatically but many times this ended up having to be disabled and then re-enabled to make sure it worked properly. Now with the new HD5970 it simply works in Crossfire mode right out of the box. In fact the CCC [Catalyst Control Center] only sees it as a single card, you cannot turn Crossfire off.

Last on the list of new features is unfortunately one that we will have to test out for you later. According to AMD Crossfire is now enabled for Eyefinity. Yep you can now use up to three monitors for your gaming pleasure and still get the benefits of both GPUs. Note that this feature is not enabled for discrete cards in Crossfire, i.e. it doesn’t work on two 5850s or three 5770’s. We weren’t given the exact Catalyst version when the “Crossfire <3 Eyefinity” feature will trickle down to discrete variants.

In all not a bad list of improvements at all.

The full specifications of the HD 5970 compared to the rest of the 5800 family are shown below.

Performance

Test systems and comments
We are going to break our usual review style here and head right into what you want to know about. How fast is the new HD5970? Well there are a few things we have to get out of the way first but we will be diving into that in just a second.

First you need to know the system that all of this was run on.

Intel Core i7 Extreme 975 [3.33GHz] [provided by Intel]
ASRock X58 Extreme [P130 BIOS] [provided by ASRock]
6GB Kingston KHX12800D3T1K3/6GX [provided by Kingston]
128GB Patriot Torqx SSD [Provided by Patriot]
Ultra X4 1200Watt Fully Modular PSU [Provided by Ultra]
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64 [With all patches up to 11/12/2009]

AMD GPUs and drivers used
Radeon HD 5970 [provided by AMD] 8.663.1_Beta4_Hemlock_VistaWin7_Nov6
Radeon HD 4850 X2 [provided by Sapphire] Cat 9-10
Radeon HD 4890 [Provided by Gigabyte] Cat 9-10

nVidia GPUs used
Zotac AMP! Edition GTX 285 [clocked down to stock speed for reference] [provided by Zotac] Forceware 191.07

    
Click to Enlarge – Opens new Window

Unfortunately at the time of writing we were not able to test with a GTX 295 [a closer product to the HD5970] or another dual card configuration. Our reference motherboard and a set of Zotac GTX 280s was damaged by a Topower Tiger 1200Watt PSU [all three were completely destroyed] and we still have not been able to resolve that issue with them. In fact we have not heard from them on the matter since we asked for independent testing of the cards and the PSU [at their suggestion] on October 22nd. We will try to get some additional GPUs in for future tests but were unable to in time to meet the lifting of the NDA.

For the performance section we are not going to go into each game like we normally would but will just comment on the results. Instead we will cover some general information here. We used a group of Synthetic and real-world tests. All of our real-world testing was actual in-game testing. To accomplish this we used FRAPS version 3.0.1 to capture frame rates during actual game play. For each game we selected a level and ran that same level through three times. The scores for minimum, maximum and average were recorded. The average of these three runs was used for our final result. Settings for each game are shown below.  The Synthetic tests will be covered before each with a brief description where needed, but otherwise each is very self-explanatory.

Now on with the testing results!

Gaming
This is what you really want to know about so let’s get into it.

Call of Duty 6: Modern Warfare 2

Impressive is a word I would use here, overkill is another. Playing MW2 on the HD 5970 was quite a treat. In fact I ended up finishing the game; all in the name of testing of course.

Crysis

Ah the age old question, Will it play Crysis? I believe it was first postulated by the greeks… um I meant geeks. Well the answer to that question is Hell yes. I was able to max out the game in terms of settings and resolution and still get 48 Frames per Second [more than double what any of the other cards we tested could get]. Finally, two years of toil we have a card that can Play Crysis in DX10 mode without dying or stuttering! Then again, similar story happened with the original Far Cry too.

Borderlands

Wow color me surprised, but the GTX 285 is able to eek out a win here. Granted the margin of victory is only 0.190 frames per second…, ok let’s call it a tie but still an interesting happening to be sure. It looks like the game is loaded with long shaders which play into hands of 240 cores of GTX 285, instead of 640 “fat” units inside Hemlock’s two GPUs.

BattleForge [Play4Free]

BattleForge is an EA title heavily sponsored by AMD, in fact during the opening “credits” we are treated to a nice AMD animated banner just like the annoying TWIMTBP banners from NV. As such it is no wonder we see the GTX 285 simply trounced here. This test was hands down an embarrassment for the 285 and that is putting it midly.

Then again, this on-line strategy carries the title of world’s first DirectX 11 application.

Dragon Age: Origins

Dragon Age: Origins is the latest hit title from Bioware. From the looks of it, it seems to favor multiple GPUs quite nicely, as we see both the 5970 and the 4850 X2 perform exceptionally well in this game. The margin of victory here is simply mind numbing.

Original Author: Sean Kalinich

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