Video Card

Having a look at the card, you can see that there's nothing that we haven't seen before. As we mentioned in the past, the HD 5970 cooler is essentially a larger version of the HD 5870 one with the same overall design on the cooler being seen.

That doesn't mean that GIGABYTE haven't done anything. As usual we can see they've added their own sticker to the cooler which lets us know the model and brand. Hopefully the fact that the design kits have gone out to ATI partners recently means we'll begin to see companies mix up the model in the near future with new coolers and big overclocks.

Doing a quick spin around the card, we can see our two power connectors that sit up the top towards the back. Here we have a single 6-Pin connector along with a single 8-Pin one. Staying across the top but moving closer to the front, we can see our single CrossFire connector that lets us run a second one of these cards together.

Looking at the I/O side of things, we've got two Dual-Link DVI connectors along with a single Mini DisplayPort connector. If you missed the last page and you're concerned about the fact that your monitor doesn't have a Mini Display port, you'll be glad to know that a convertor to standard DisplayPort is included in the bundle.

Specifications

As we mentioned, the card we're looking at today from GIGABYTE carries with it the stock HD 5970 clocks. What this means is that the core comes in at 725MHz and the 2GB of GDDR5 carries with it a clock speed of 4000MHz QDR.

While that's all good and well, we've taken the time to let the model breathe a bit better. In turn we've been able to increase the core to 910MHz and the memory to 4740MHz QDR. Now, we don't really have to say how impressive that is compared to the stock model, so we're not going to. Instead we'll get stuck into having a quick look at our test system before seeing what these increased numbers do for us.