Overclocking Performance
Adding value to the Radeon HD 5970 are its stock overclocking abilities that helped us squeeze almost 20% more performance out of it at 2560x1600. The ability to adjust the voltage of any Radeon HD 5970 card should come as a bonus to enthusiast-level consumers and extreme gamers, though we hope AMD is working on providing better software for the consumer.
Although we finished off with a 25% core and memory overclock, it came far from easy using a beta version of the Catalyst drivers. After what seemed like endless stuffing around we achieved a stable overclock with the core running at 900MHz and the memory at 1250MHz.
Overclocking improved the 3Dmark Vantage score at 2560x1600 by 20% as the Radeon HD 5970 was awarded 11099pts. This made the Radeon some 65% faster than the GeForce GTX 295, which was the next fastest graphics card tested.
Company of Heroes Opposing Fronts allowed for a 17% performance increase at 2560x1600 when overclocking the Radeon HD 5970.
The only other game we had time to test after finally achieving a decent overclock was S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat where we saw healthy performance gains again. The performance at 2560x1600 was increased by 18% making the Radeon HD 5970 around 78% faster than the Radeon HD 5870.