We’re talking about a limited number of cards (1000 units) with serious pricing, but we do believe that they will find their place. For US$1000 you get a HD 5970 4GB that’s different from the rest of the HD 5970 2GB/4GB pack by its six video outs (Eyefinity 6) and is a dual slot card, rather than a triple-slot one. XFX’s card is 30.8cm long, just like the reference card.



As you can see from the picture, the cooler is not the reference solution and should thus cool the two Cypress XT cores much better.

The distance between the cores on the PCB is bigger than on the reference card and the fan is placed in the center rather than at the end of the card.

Beneath the hood are two aluminum heatsinks sitting on copper GPU blocks with three copper heatpipes going.




HD 5970 4GB Black Edition is an Eyefinity edition card, meaning it comes with six video outs. We're talking about six mini-DisplayPort connectors but we'll talk more on Eyefinity soon.

XFX designed the card to run as fast as possible and crunching ultra high resolutions needs some serious overclocking. Compared to the reference card, the GPU runs 125MHz faster and the memory is 200MHz faster (800MHz effectively). The memory in question is Hynix H5GQ1H24AFR T2C.



The card comes with a CrossFire connectors, although it's a bit hard to imagine anyone buying two of these cards. Still, as our experience showed, you never know. Overclock and 4GB of memory spell higher consumption so the card is powered via two 8-pin connectors, unlike the reference card that uses 6-pin and 8-pin connectors.

It supports DirectX 11, OpenGL 4, ShaderModel 5.0, PCI-Express 2.0, DirectCompute 5.0, GPU video acceleration and 7.1 audio (including Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio).