XFX HD 5870 Review

RHKCommander959 - October 7, 2009
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Testing:

To test the XFX HD 5870, the card will be used in a range of games and benchmarks to see how well it performs against other competitive products. The games consist of Far Cry 2, Crysis Warhead, BioShock, Call of Duty World at War, Fallout 3, Dead Space, Left 4 Dead, and the benchmarks are 3DMark 06 and 3DMark Vantage. After running the card normally through the testing phase, the video card will then be overclocked and then re-tested. The results of the overclocked and stock speed performance can then be compared to see how large of a gain (if any) is made. All of the system settings remain the same from card to card and test to test, with the exception of disabling PhysX for Nvidia cards on 3DMark Vantage.

Processor: Intel Core i7 920 150x20
Motherboard: MSI X58 Platinum
Memory:Mushkin HP3 12800 7-7-7-20
Video Card(s):XFX HD 4870 1GB HD-487A-ZWFC
Power Supply: Mushkin 800 watt Modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Western Digital Green 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: LG DVD-RW
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition 64-bit SP1
Case: Hiper Osiris

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

XFX HD 5870 900/1260

Overclocking video cards that are the forerunners of a new series is generally difficult - there isn't a ton of options or information out to set the card up properly. Depending on the driver versions, ATI Catalyst Control Centers Overdrive did not always function properly. With RC6 however it did function for the most part, I hit the maximum 900 core and 1270 memory, backing down to 1260 just incase for stability. However, the voltage regulators are software modifiable. Using AMD GPU tool I was able to increase the speeds over the limit in Overdrive, and with the help of MSI Afterburner for voltage control of the GPU I was able to hit 1010 on the core! The only problem was that although the speeds were showing up properly, benchmark scores were disappointingly low. When the drivers and software both mature more this card should devastate at 1GHz+ core speeds! I finally decided to test at 900 core and 1260 memory as I did see a more noticeable gain with Overdrive than I did with the other software at this point. Clock speeds were being reported as correct with the other software but the data with very little to no gain didn't make much sense in comparison to the speed gain from overclocking, so the Overdrive speeds were used for the overclocked testing.