Review: Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 in CrossFireX: say hello to our little friends

Power draw and HEXUS.bang4buck

Power draw

With the Radeon HD 5870 doing an excellent job of keeping power-draw in check, a pair of cards configured in CrossFireX are able to idle at an impressively-low 136W. The duo do draw 357W when under load, but it's worth noting that that figure remains lower than the erstwhile dual-GPU Radeon HD 4870 X2.

HEXUS.bang4buck

In a rough-and-ready assessment of the cards' bang per buck, we've aggregated the 2,560x1,600 frame-rates for five games, normalised them* and taken account of the cards' prices.

But there are more provisos than we'd care to shake a stick at. We could have chosen five different games, the cards' prices could have been derived from other sources and pricing tends to fluctuate daily.

Consequently, the table below highlights a metric that should only be used as a yardstick for evaluating comparative performance with price factored in. Other architectural benefits are not covered, obviously.

Somewhat surprisingly, the near-£600 cost of two Radeon HD 5870s isn't a really bad proposition at 2,560x1,600, and that's down to the massive aggregate marks. There's simply a lot of performance for your pound, but let's not forget that cards such as the Radeon HD 4890 OC offer decent performance for a fraction of the price - hence the higher HEXUS.bang4buck score for older cards.