ASUS Reveals Overclocked Radeon HD 5970 Card

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Yesterday, we covered Sapphire’s overclocked Radeon HD 5970 that they had on display at CeBIT. Now, ASUS’ own overclocked Radeon HD 5970 was spotted at CeBIT. Both factory overclocked cards are surprising similar to each other in clockspeeds, memory speeds and heatsink designs. Again, with Fermi coming out, these companies could be trying to put out strong competitors.

It’s odd that ASUS’ overclocked card is based on ATI’s Cypress GPU, since the Hemlock one is natively found in the Radeon HD 5970 reference card. It’s possible that ASUS found it easier to overclock. At any rate – for comparison, the original reference spec for the 5970 is a clockspeed of 725MHz with a memory speed of 1000MHz (effective, 4000MHz).

ASUS has got their factory overclocked graphics card running at a clockspeed of 850MHz and a memory speed of 4800MHz, which is substantially faster than the reference card, and a quite impressive feat. Although, the interesting thing is that this super card has the same specs as the Sapphire card from yesterday. Obviously, they’ll be competing in the high-end space with such similar cards.

Like Sapphire card yesterday, this ASUS card is three PCI slots tall, with the cooler taking up two slots. While the cooler on this ASUS card is much better looking than the Sapphire one, it also requires more power, with this ASUS card requiring two 8-pin power connectors and one 6-pin power connector. The power needs are so far, the only difference we can tell between the two cards.

No word from ASUS on pricing or a release date. Expect this one to be expensive.