Otaku Gadgets

The battle between the top two Graphics card makers, AMD and Nvidia became rather interesting in the last few months. Despite several efforts by AMD, its products failed to topple the Nvidia GTX 295, the performance king of GPUs. However, the industry insiders were hopeful about its much hyped Hemlock chip will be able to produce a winner. At last it seems that AMD has come up with a winning product that will give Nvidia a run for its money. It recently announced the availability of the Radeon HD 5970. As of now, it is the fastest graphics card running on a solo GPU. It is among the few GPUs in the market that supports Microsoft’s latest DirectX 11 technology.

This card is clearly meant for the hardcore gamers who want realistic quality graphics and visual effects in the games they play and do not bother about the cost. According to AMD, the HD 5970 is highly overclockable and its integrated ATi Overdrive technology enables the users to overclock the card without compromising on stability. The OEM vendors like Asus, Sapphire are likely to bring their versions of the card based on this chip set. A few newly launched Alienware PCs already feature this GPU.

To cope up with the heat and over-clocking, the HD 5970 has been equipped with a powerful fan and advanced vapor cooling technology. It also has a robust vented exhaust to let the heat dissipate. It can be used to connect three display units simultaneously. In the initial tests the card easily matched and exceeded the performance of the Nvidia GTX 295 by a fair margin. In the games that make extensive use of Vertex shaders and anti aliasing the performance lead is significant.