Even as NVIDIA is taking its own sweet time to complete building its lineup of DirectX 11 compliant GPUs to target all market segments, AMD, which got a 6 months’ headstart into releasing its lineup, which ended up targeting all market segments in a span of 5 months, is readying the Radeon HD 6000 series for launch well within this year. Just as the Radeon HD 5000 series GPU family was codenamed Evergreen with its members codenamed after evergreen trees (such as Cypress, Juniper, Redwood, Cedar), the Radeon HD 6000 is codenamed “Southern Islands”, with its members codenamed after islands in the Caribbean (not islands in the Mediterranean).

“Bart” (after Saint Barthélemy island) is the codename for the performance/upper-mid segment GPU, a successor to the “Juniper” Radeon HD 5700 series. “Cayman” (after Cayman Islands) is the enthusiast GPU, successor to Cypress, and will go into making SKUs that succeed the Radeon HD 5800 series. Finally, the king of the hill is codenamed “Antilles” (after Antilles Islands), it is the dual-GPU SKU that makes use of two Cayman GPUs, successor to the Radeon HD 5970 “Hemlock”. AMD partners will be in a position to sell graphics cards based on these by November 2010. The Radeon HD 6970 “Antilles” should be out by December 2010. The lower-half of the family will likely release next year.

Source: DonanimHaber

PowerColor’s latest high end graphics card which surfaced in April, as a graphics card with the ability to run 12 displays in ATI Eyefinity arrays, seems to have finally taken shape, with the company calling it the PowerColor HD 5970 Eyefinity 12. This graphics card is based on the Radeon HD 5970 dual-GPU graphics card, but makes use of display outputs from both GPUs.

PowerColor had to extend the connectivity on a third slot with mini-Display Port connectors, as it ran out on space with two slots holding 6 connectors and the crucial air-exhaust vent. The second set of mini-DP connectors sit on a riser card, which is detachable, turning the card into a dual-slot Eyefinity6 card. To help handle 12 display heads, the card has 4 GB of GDDR5 memory spread across two 256-bit wide memory interfaces. It is capable of running large Eyefinity display heads which span across all the 12 physical displays. The Eyefinity12 card from PowerColor is expected to be launched during the Computex event, early next month.

Source: TechConnect Magazine

The Swiss low noise cooling solution provider ARCTIC COOLING today announced the launch of two VGA coolers – the Accelero XTREME 5970 and Accelero XTREME 5870. These two 3-fan solutions are tailor-made for ATI Radeon HD5970 / HD5870. They follow the sophisticated design of the Accelero XTREME series, offering the best cooling for these high-end graphics cards.

Both models are equipped with three 92mm PWM fans running from 900 to 2,000 RPM, generating 81 CFM airflow for efficient heat dissipation from the core(s). The Accelero XTREME 5970 is designed with an 8-heatpipe and 119-fin architecture to achieve 300 watts cooling for the dual-GPU Radeon HD5970. Whereas the Accelero XTREME 5870 comes with 5 heatpipes and 84 fins, providing 250 watts cooling capacity for the Radeon HD5870. A layer of the ARCTIC MX-2 thermal compound is also pre-applied on the base of these two coolers.

Arctic Cooling has a long history of making excellent aftermarket coolers for AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards. Their latest innovation is the triple slot Accelero Xtreme 5970 which supports AMD’s dual-GPU HD 5970 cards. Sapphire has chosen to use this very cooling solution for their HD 5970 OC 4 GB flagship, of course the cooler will be available in retail as well.

ASUS is known to toy with bleeding-edge technology to give out high-end products. Earlier, ASUS put two GeForce GTX 285 GPUs into one accelerator to give out a custom-design product that outperformed NVIDIA’s dual-GPU GeForce GTX 295. According to o.v.e.r.clockers.at, ASUS might be doing something similar, this time around with AMD’s Cypress GPUs in its Radeon HD 5870 avatar. It is said to be working on a dual-HD 5870 graphics card, codenamed “Ares”.

While the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970 uses full-featured AMD Cypress GPUs (with all its stream processors and memory bus width available), ASUS will attempt to use the one disparity between an HD 5970 and two HD 5870 to its advantage: clock speeds. The Cypress GPUs in HD 5970 feature lower clock speeds (725/1000 MHz core/memory) compared to the single Cypress GPU on the HD 5870 (850/1200 MHz). Electrical constraints are probably the reason behind this. It is likely that ASUS will use stronger VRM circuitry to power the two GPUs to run at higher speeds, while also providing some overclocking headroom.

AMD in a recent conference call to the press said that it didn’t expect to see custom-design HD 5970-like accelerators till Q2 2010, although we don’t infer there to be any sort of restriction in place, as was the case with NVIDIA and its GTX 295. Ares is likely named after the Greek God of warfare by the name. An apt successor to Mars (which also happens to be the name of the Roman God of war), ASUS’ previous attempt at an extreme high-end graphics card of its own design.

Source: o.v.e.r.clockers.at