If you've been browsing through retailers today looking at the Radeon HD 5000-series cards on offer, you may not have noticed that ASUS' cards are a little more unique than most of the competition as they're equipped with what the Taiwanese manufacturer calls Voltage Tweak Technology.
Voltage Tweak Technology, controlled by ASUS' own SmartDoctor software, allows users to increase a card's GPU voltage, leading to a boost in GPU and memory frequencies.
We've yet to test it for ourselves on AMD's latest cards, but the figures we're being quoted are impressive. According to ASUS, its Radeon HD 5870 can have its voltage raised from 1,15V to 1,35V, resulting in a GPU clock speed bump from 850MHz to 1,035MHz and a rise in memory speed from 4,800MHz to 5,200MHz. That's essentially the fastest single-GPU graphics card made faster, and we reckon those figures may give an indication of Radeon HD 5890 performance.
For those wanting to save a few pennies, ASUS' Voltage Tweak-packing Radeon HD 5850 can raise voltage from 1.088V to 1.4V. That'll increase GPU clock speed from 725MHz to 1,050MHz and memory clock speed from 4,000MHz to 5,200MHz.
We'll have to take ASUS' word for it, but those are impressive figures - and we're told the Voltage Tweak'd Radeon HD 5870 provides a 38 per cent boost in 3DMark Vantage.
As with most other Radeon HD 5000-series cards, ASUS' offerings will ship with a coupon for Colin McRae: DiRT 2. That coupon should prove to be useful when the PC version of the game launches sometime later this year.
Official press release: ASUS Launches World’s First EAH5800 Series Graphics Cards with Voltage Tweak Technology for up to a 38% Performance Upgrade
