Buss width? XFX Radeon HD 5970 (Black Edition)

hinderaker

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Feb 20, 2010
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Hello,

Earlier I had an 4870x2 (Golden Sample) that was broken. So I got my money back and bought a XFX Radeon HD 5970 (Black Edition).

So now I've been checking it out as good as I can with Stability test (FurMark) and TechPowerUp GPU to see if everything seems okey. What I noticed was that it says my Bus Width is 256 Bit.

I specificly ordered the XFX cause it had 2GB GDDR5 512-bit compared to the others with 256 bit.

Is that false information or arent this Bus Width at all?

Please help! Sorry for my bad english.
 
Nope, that information (programs) is correct, because the 5970 is a "dual GPU" card.

So, the PR clowns like to use "256x2" bits on the information pages when they shoud add what I'm telling you here.

Same applies for VRAM. It probably says 2GB when it really has 1GB per chip.

That's a great card, enjoy it and let it be :p

Cheers!
 
The 5970 is made from 2 5870s on a single board, each GPU has 1GB GDDR5 with a 256-bit bus, but when they label dual GPU cards they tend to just add the numbers together because it looks better that way, so they often list them as 3200 shaders, 512-bit bus, and 2GB GDDR5 while each GPU on the board only has half of that. You still have the fastest graphics card in the world.
 

hinderaker

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Offcourse. Make sense. The internet store where I bought it said 512 bit on the XFX and 256 on all the others so I went for the XFX. Still I think the XFX one isn't a bad card so no big deal. Atleast I got an explination.

Really OFF-Topic but will ask anyway. Will I get to use the 5970 all out with Amd Phenom II x4 3.0 Ghz (no oc) and 8GB Crossair Dominator 1066Mhz? Tried to find some kind of "requirements" for the card. But didn't find anything.

Got a bad feeling i might need i7 and DDR3 to fully "use" this huge achivement of a graphic card. Don't have any games making me fully use it so no problem at this date but I'm thinking in the near future with more DirectX 11 games and better and better graphics.

Thanks again for your answer. Really made sense.
 
There is minimal performance difference between the i7 and Phenom II in games, as once you hit 1920x1080 the performance of the GPU tends to be the limiting factor since both of those CPUs have extremely high bottlenecks in most games. Even if you do have a CPU bottleneck it will be at 90FPS or more so it wont hurt you at all and will just give you an excuse to crank up the detail levels and AA.
 
You will always use the card at it's fullest.

The thing we like to call bottlenecks exist, but they just make the $/FPS ratio be less appealing.

When your PC doesn't give you the FPS's you want, it's time for a change IMO. Never mind the little details :p

Cheers!
 

hinderaker

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Feb 20, 2010
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Nice nice. Was kinda worried I was in over my head buying "the fastest graphic card in the world" when the rest of my computer is about a year old. As I said earlier I have no need for fully "using" the card at this date but when the day comes it would be nice if the rest of my computer could keep up with it :)

Thanks again everyone. You've been at great help.