ASUS EAH5870 1GB Graphics Card Review

Posted by: Sahil Mannick (Helios1234) on: 11/10/2009 09:47 AM [ Print | 0 comment(s) ]

Features and Specifications

Features
• 1GB GDDR5 video memory
• ATI EyefinityTM Technology for 3-monitor output!
•HDCP compliant
• ATI CrossfireX Technology with multi-GPU support
• ATI PowerPlay Technology
• Variety Connectivity: Dual DVI * 2/D-Sub/HDMI/HDCP/DisplayPort Compliant
• More than 2 teraflops!
• ATI Stream Technology for parallel processing tasks
• Microsoft Direct X 11 & OpenGL 3.1 compliant
• PCI Express 2.0 support
• ASUS Exclusive innovations

ASUS Exclusive innovations
• ASUS Splendid: Watching video on PCs is now as good as on the best TVs
• ASUS GamerOSD: Real-time overclocking, benchmarking and video capturing in any PC game!
• ASUS SamartDoctor: Intelligent hardware protection and overclocking tool for your graphics card

Comparing the full specifications of the HD 5870 to its predecessor shows that it sports some very impressive upgrades over the RV770 chip. Using a 40nm process, ATI have managed to fit an impressive 2.15 billion transistors on a 334mm2 die size. This is over double that of the HD 4870 which consisted of a "mere" 956 million transistors. So what is ATI using all those extra transistors for?

The first thing we can take notice of in the specifications table is that the number of stream processors, texture units and raster operations have all doubled! While this does not match Nvidia's GTX 295, it is a first approximation of what we can expect from the new card. The core clock has been boosted by 100 MHz and the memory, by an impressive 300 MHz. This is effectively a 1.2GHz increase considering the use of GDDR5 memory. Impressively, those changes help achieve a compute performance of 2.72 GFLOPS, over double that of the HD 4870 and just under 1 GFLOP higher than the current crown holder, the GTX 295.