본문 바로가기

Radeon Cards

Radeon 5870 SOC review

A bit of a trend these days among ATI's partners selling Radeon HD 5870 cards is literally 'who's got the biggest e-peen'. It is very nice to see them push the limit further and further in producing the fastest pre-overclocked Radeon HD 5870, yes I am talking about OC (overclock) models which ATI apparently allows to be made nowadays.

We have seen models from HIS, MSI, PowerColor, ASUS and now Gigabyte is releasing an overclocked Radeon HD 5870 as well. Gigabyte did it properly I can already state, they overhauled the PCB, used first rate components, changed the cooling solutions and badabing badaboom... there it is. The Radeon HD 5870 SOC edition graphics card.

Gigabyte's Radeon HD 5870 SOC is not 'just' a pre-overclocked card, they are really serious about it. At default this card comes clocked at a 950 MHz core and the memory is purring steady at 5000 MHz, so that's another 100 MHz on that core and another 200 MHz on the memory.

We'd almost forget that this obviously is a regular 5870 as well and thus comes DirectX 11 ready and can take advantage of DirectCompute, multi-threading, Hardware Tessellation and new shader 5.0 extensions. Another big feature of the product that you already learned about is of course Eyefinity, the ability to connect multiple monitors to your videocard and use it in a desktop environment, or to create an incredible wide monitor resolution to play games in. ATI has changed the rules as the Radeon HD 5870 has 1600 stream processors (shader processors). ATI literally doubled up everything inside that rv770 GPU and as such we spot a GPU die with 2.15 billion transistors.

Have a peek at the coolness in the photos over the next few pages and then let's start up a nice lengthy review to see if the SOC edition has got what it takes to be among the top ranking Radeon HD 5870 cards on the market.

Let's dive into the review, have a look at the product, test it, overclock it and well, just have swell ol' time.


Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6 review

Think about this for a second, can you even grasp the idea that it has only been six months ago when ATI released its first DX11 class products ... six months (!) Not a month went by with ATI not releasing a new product in that Radeon Series 5000 range.

The cycle is complete though, ATI filled every little and foreseeable gap in the DX11 class graphics card market. As such they will now focus on respins, future products and the more niche gear with somewhat lower priority.

Niche is the word that I like to label today's test product with. Extravagant, extraordinary, yes ATI finally released it's Eyefinity6 SKU officially. Though we believe this will be one tough puppy to find on the market one fact remains .. there will be small market for this product. And sure, not so much the gamer, but the professional end user and corporate entities can save a lot of dough with a product like shown today. Imagine presentations on a couple on say a monitor or four, an instruction video on the other and so on. What am I talking about ? Eyefinity6 .. a high-end Radeon HD 5870 based graphics card with no less than six display port output connectors that can drive six monitors simultaneously for you to wither work, present or play games at an insane and nearly ridiculous monitor resolution.

And gaming, yep .. it is exactly that last option what we'll be looking at today. We know .. we understand, there's 0.01% chance that any of you would purchase and replicate a similar setup as shown in this article it certainly is fun to read up on. It's x-factor hardware, Top Gear stuff for computer geeks and gamers.

So yes, we'll look at Eyefinity6, we'll build a nice frame that can hold the six Dell monitors we are using in this review and then will get our groove on. Now we'll also show some performance numbers as we'll not only use one, but two Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6 cards, which we'll setup in CrossfireX, but more overly I like this article to be a show case. As such we'll record some high-definition footage and show you videos of a gaming in a MASSIVE monitor resolution of 5040x2100

HIS 5870 V iCooler Turbo review

how it is possible to see so many overlcocked and special edition Radeon HD 5870 cards so close to NVIDIA's Fermi launch. Hey everybody and welcome to yet another ATI series 5000 review.

Today a product based on the oh so popular Radeon HD 5870 that comes with customized PCB and a more extreme cooler. Yes, the quest for more MHz has started and as such HIS has introduced a more fashionable version compared to the reference design.

The HIS Radeon HD 5870 iCooler V Turbo edition features a custom-designed cooler that's improved from the iCooler IV HIS, you can perhaps remember they used one on some graphics cards (last generation Radeon HD 4890). The card itself then, while the non-Turbo variants use reference AMD clock speeds of 850 MHz core and 1200 MHz memory, the Turbo model we test today, ups that number to 875 MHz and 1225 MHz respectively, brings a little more kapoooow to the product. The HIS R5870 V iCooler Turbo features 1 GB of GDDR5 memory, and great monitor connectivity. You will have two DVI-D, and one HDMI and DisplayPort connector at your disposal. As added bonus HIS released a special SKU that comes with a full copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 as well.

See, we'd almost forget that this obviously is a regular 5870 as well and thus comes DX11 ready and can take advantage of DirectCompute, multi-threading, Hardware Tessellation and new shader 5.0 extensions.  Another big feature of the product that you already learned about is of course Eyefinity, the ability to connect one to six monitors (depending on AIC/AIB choices in outputs) to your videocard and use it in a desktop environment, or to create an incredible wide monitor resolution to play games in. ATI has changed the rules as the Radeon HD 5870 has 1600 stream processors (shader processors). ATI literally doubled up everything inside that GPU and as such we spot a GPU die with 2.15 billion transistors. That's 2150 million transistors you guys. In comparison, the Radeon HD 4890 has 956 million. Already available, the regular HIS HD 5870 iCooler V is priced at 339 Euro, whereas the HD 5870 iCooler V Turbo carries a price of 359 Euro. If you want the Call of Duty MW 2 bundle, I think the price is only a tenner more which would mean great value.

Have a peek at the coolness in the photo below .. and then let's startup a nice lengthy review to see if the HIS R5870 V iCooler Turbo has got what it takes to be among the top ranking Radeon HD 5870 cards on the market.


'Radeon Cards' 카테고리의 다른 글

Radeon HD 5670 Cyclone 1G review  (1) 2011.09.03
Radeon HD 5830 Twin Frozr II review  (1) 2011.09.03
Radeon 6850 ICEQ X Turbo review  (0) 2011.09.03
Radeon 6870 ICEQ X Turbo X review  (0) 2011.09.03
Radeon 6770 ICEQX Turbo Crossfire review  (0) 2011.09.03