AMD seems to be on the right track with their HD5xxx series, since their cards become just faster and faster and there’s no stopping them. A few days ago, their latest crop – the Radeon HD5970 – made its way to the retail stores and awaits you there with a pricetag of $600.

The HD5970 has two separate Cypress cores with 1GB GDDR5 memory each. The engine clock goes up to 725 MHz (the HD5870 one is 850 MHz), while memory runs at 1000 MHz. And it has full hardware support for DirectX 11.

Looking at the specs table made by tomshardware.com you can see that the new HD5970 is exactly twice the HD5850 was (even price-wise). But prepare for a huge power drown – at full throttle the HD5970 uses 300W and combined with the board power reaches a bit under 400W. If you want Crossfire with two of these 1 kW power supply is the minimum requirement for you… plus a bag full of cash.

In most of the benchmark tests made by tomshardware.com, the HD5970 show almost similar performance with a Crossfire configuration of 2x HD5870 and outperforms all NVIDIA contenders.

You can find the full review here.