In addition to reference clocked versions, Sapphire and XFX are apparently first AIB partners that are going to do factory overclocked HD 5970 cards. We already told you that HD 5970 might be an overclocking beast and there might be a lot of room for additional overclocking. It looks like the chip can take it easily and AMD could have dropped it in order to maintain the 294W TDP.

Sapphire has decided to go for the minimal overclock of 10MHz for the GPU and 10MHz (40Gpbs) for memory, which means that the card ended up working at 735MHz for the core and 4040Gbps for memory. This can hardly be considered as a factory overclock but according to the box shot, the card comes with "Red Line" overclocking software, which might mean that the additional overclock is possible.

XFX is another partner that will do a factory overclock card that will be sold under the Black Edition brand. The card has already been announced, and it will be shipped with stock clocks but according to XFX's site the GPU can be pushed to 1GHz for the core and 6.0GHz for memory.

This is possible by adjusting voltage via XFX Overvolt Tool that will be available to those that register their product at XFX site. It might mean that the Black Edition comes with hand picked chips that are capable of reaching these high clocks, and it is nice to know that there is a way to make the card even faster.

You can check out the Sapphire card below and the XFX details can be found here. Both cards are currently listed and Sapphire's is available at Alternate.de in Europe. You can find them both listed here.