We met with Dan Forster and Bill Donnelly of Sapphire fame and got introduced to new products. It seems GeForce GTX 480 will have one tough battle on its hands, as Sapphire preps “HD5990”.

In our opinion, Sapphire’s “HD5990” has everything an enthusiast might want – for the non-scalable titles; Sapphire’s HD5970 OC will perform as a HD 5870 until AMD gets the drivers right, rather than suffering HD 5850 performance.

HD5990 is the dream of every enthusiast

With this board, you get what you don’t get with a regular one; custom tailored eight-heatpipe heatsink by Arctic Cooling will keep the board more cooler than the standard ATI heatsink, yet it supports higher clocks.

The clocks on this “HD5990” are 850 MHz [realistically, 853 MHz] and 1200 MHz QDR for the 4GB of GDDR5 memory. Grand total bandwidth of the board is 307.2 GB/s – just like the Ares we described earlier. However, unlike ASUS HD 5970 Ares, Sapphire didn’t physically enlarge the product – so the PCB is of standard height and should have no clearance issues even in narrow cases. If you can fit an HD5970, you can fit this board.

The only noticeable change from the standard stock HD5970 is the fact that Sapphire built their own PCB and placed two 8-pin power connectors. That’s right, this puppy can eat 375W of juice – Dan told us that there is even overclocking headroom, as these parts actually consume around the same amount of power as two separate 5870’s.

We don’t think that 15-20 Watts of extra power will give you any major GPU clock jumps as you’re pushing the term as it is. However, you should be able to significantly overclock the video memory, just like AMD told us in HD5970 pre-launch briefing.

As we mentioned that this board comes with 4GB of GDDR5 memory, there is a situation with 32-bit operating systems. In real world, this board should be used only with 64-bit operating system but unlike nVidia’s products, you should not have major issues on 32-bit operating systems. Then again, I would say that something’s wrong with you if you decided to pay a price premium over HD5970 and install a 32-bit operating system to play minecraft or emulate slot machines from the ’80s 😉

Officially, this product will be named just as every other overclocked Radeon HD 5970 but in reality, we’re talking about “HD5990”, AMD’s double whammy to respond to nVidia’s GeForce GTX 480. Given that we managed to learn partner allocations for GTX 470 and GTX 480, it is not surprising to see AMD lifting the lid on the overclocked parts.

According to our information, partners plan to compete against nVidia on 1:1 ratio between overclocked 5970 boards and GTX 480, which is a pretty interesting plan. Gotta love the competition, right?

Original Author: Theo Valich