Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 Takes "World's Fastest Title"

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Yesterday, I covered the factory overclocked Radeon HD 5850 graphics card from Sapphire. At the CeBIT Show in Germany, Sapphire was showing off another one of their Viper series special factory overclocked cards. This new one, being an overclocked version of the world’s fastest card spec (Radeon HD 5970) will take the title as “World’s Fastest Graphics Card”.

As you can see, it has the same custom blue PCB board that the overclocked 5850 was built on – this is on all Viper series cards. It will have a whopping 4GB of VRAM. The GPU has a clockspeed of 850MHz while the memory has an effective speed of 4800MHz. By comparison, the reference card from ATI has a GPU clockspeed of 725MHz and 4000MHz – so this card has substantial overclocking.

As you can see, the card has a big heatsink topped off by three fans. I’d be disappointed if this was more than just a prototype, considering that their overclocked Viper 5850 had such an awesome silent Vapor Chamber cooler. This ugly heatsink-fan combo actually takes up three PCI card slots on your motherboard, since the fans stick past the second PCI port and will block the second. I’m not sure if this “triple-decker” style graphics card is what we’ll see in future generations.

The back panel on the graphics card features two DVI ports and a DisplayPort. No word on pricing or a release date yet. This new card is definitely coming to market, though. Benchmarking nerds will pleased to know that Sapphire got a 3DMark Vantage score of upwards of 22,000 with this card.