For a while we saw a flurry of new NVIDIA cards while ATI kind of sat stagnant. That's stopped now with the release of the new Radeon HD 5800 series from the red team. Over the next few months we are going to see plenty of the Radeon HD 5870 we have with us today, along with these lower Radeon HD 5850 edition and the higher Radeon HD 5870 X2 version. Not only that though, we are going to see companies like Sapphire, Gigabyte and more put their very own spin on it, be it an Atomic or Turbo model. What we think the Radeon HD 5800 series is capable of today is going to be proven wrong within weeks with companies giving us even more performance than the stock model we will be looking at first. - TweakTown

Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 1GB Graphics Card Review

Having a look at the package, there isn't much as far as differences go when it comes to overall design. Across the top we have the Sapphire logo on one side while on the other side we see mention that the card comes with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. Next to this we also see another sticker that shows us Dirt 2 and below that we have the model, in this case the very important Radeon HD 5870. Below the model we have another game logo, and moving below that, we see some of the main features which include CrossFireX and more. Across the very bottom we see mention of DirectX 11 and a few other interesting features.

While the Radeon HD 4890 cooler took up the majority of the card, these Radeon HD 5870 cooler takes up the entire board in kind of an shroud, much like the GeForce GTX 200 series from NVIDIA. We see there's a fan on the far right which pushes cool air directly across the top of the GPU. So in typical fashion we see Sapphire having mixed up the overall design of the cooler by adding their own sticker to the unit which lets us know the brand and the model. Moving around to the back of the card, we can see two little holes and these help the fan draw the cool air in that is used to keep our GPU temperatures down.

This is an slightly new design as typically the air just comes in where the fan is. Of course, if you're running two cards next to each other all it's doing is drawing the hot air that's generated off the back of the second card. Continuing to have a look around the video card, there isn't anything that we haven't really seen before. Moving to the back of these graphics card, the Radeon HD 5870 requires two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors to get up and running. Staying across the top but moving closer to the front, we can see our two CrossFire connectors that give us the ability to run up to three of these graphics cards together.

The main thing we want to know is how this Radeon HD 5870 has been improved against the Radeon HD 4890 editions. First things first, the new Radeon HD 5870 is based on 40nm technology which should give us the ability to achieve higher clocks while running cooler. While another one of the big features are the stream processing units. The Radeon HD 4890 had a huge 800 of them, but this Radeon HD 5870 has really gone to town on this number and doubled that to a whopping 1600. Looking at the clocks, it is interesting to see that the core has remained at the same 850MHz while the memory clock was raised to 4800MHz effective.

That is our first Radeon HD 5870 and to be honest the card is a whole lot better than we expected it to be. The Radeon HD 5870 really had to do one thing, that was beat the GeForce GTX 285. The thing about that though, is it had to do that one thing well. The good news, it does and it manages to do it very well. It would have been nice to use the DirectX 11 functionality at launch, but with Windows 7 still not out it's not the end of the world. If you love those ATI cards, moving from a Radeon HD 4890 is going to be a great upgrade and moving from anything older is going to be simply fantastic.