Over the past three weeks since AMD released the world’s fastest 40nm DirectX 11 graphics processor, we have been on an incredibly intent pursuit to locate any available stock within the US market and inform the enthusiast community within reasonable time thereafter. Unfortunately, the task has been anything but satisfying, as every new shipment of the infamous Radeon HD 5970 sells out on an average of 14.5 minutes, according to the latest analytic data we’ve received.

ATI partners have told Fudzilla that they received decent quantities of dual-chip Radeon HD 5970 cards, but due to heavy pre-orders and huge interest, they sold out all they had in matter of hours. Some additional cards might show up tomorrow or Monday, but it looks like partners can't provide enough cards to meet demand.

ATI / AMD has finalized the Radeon HD 5970 spec. First and foremost, the card is scheduled to launch on the 18th, or this coming Wednesday and it will without a doubt be the fastest card for this Christmas.

It has two RV870 GPUs clocked at 725MHz, which is some 125MHz less than on the single GPU Radeon HD 5870, but both chips have kept 1600 shaders. This means that Radeon HD 5970 has 3200 shaders and comes with 2GB GDDR5 memory.

Maximum Board Power is 294W and the total GPU compute performance for the card is 4.64 TFLOPs.