Introduction
AMD/ATI has held dominion in the graphics-card ranks since the premium Radeon 5000-series was bolstered by the HD 5970 X2 in November 2009. In fact, the company has now completed a top-to-bottom DX11 line-up before arch-rival NVIDIA has nary a card on the retail shelves.
The green team has made no secret about launching its high-end GeForce GTX 480 GPU this Friday, though, and we've been privy to 'benchmarks' and board shots a-plenty.
ATI will probably reduce the price of the Radeon HD 5970 from its current £550-plus and sic the dual-GPU monster on NVIDIA's finest. If that's not enough, ATI's add-in board partners are also readying a super-duper Radeon HD 5870.
With timing being very much of the essence, Sapphire brought word of a pre-overclocked HD 5870 with a 2GB frame-buffer.
We take a look at the Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 TOXIC 2GB just before GTX 480 launches. Let's see how much it beats up on all current competition and conjecture whether it stands a good chance against you-know-what.
