Asus HD 5970 Voltage Tweak Edition
 

With each new generation of GPU we see better designs capable of cranking out more FPS and handling new levels of DirectX. The 58xx series from ATI/AMD is no exception. The first GPU's we saw in that line were the 5870 and 5850 and we were thrilled with those. We didn't expect to see a dual core 58xx GPU this soon in the cores evolution.

The last generation of dual core GPU from ATI was the 4870x2 and it was two 4870 GPU cores on one card and was keeping the X2 naming scheme. This time ATI slid one in on us and named the new dual core GPU 5970. Little discrepancies like that set us to scratching our heads and we have to dig in and find out why they deviate from an established naming scheme.

Well after digging in and looking at the cards the Asus 5970 Voltage Tweak Edition has all the hardware of two 5870 but it has the clock speed of the 5850 so ATI named it the 5970 to avoid bad press by naming it the 5870x2 which wouldn't be correct because of the lower clock speed. Not to worry though ATI and Asus promise massive overclocking headroom so we should be able to push this card up to and beyond the stock clocks of the 5870. That or make some pretty blue smoke emanate from the chassis.

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