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Exclusive - Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 TOXIC 2,048MB graphics card review

by Tarinder Sandhu on 24 March 2010, 11:31

Tags: Sapphire

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qawrh

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System setup and notes

Graphics cards Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X 2,048MB Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB HIS Radeon HD 5970 2,048MB BFG GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB BFG GeForce GTX 285 1,024MB EVGA GeForce GTX 275 896MB
Current pricing, including VAT £375 (estimated) £310 £225 £550 £350 £275 £199
Shader model 5.0 5.0 5.0 5.0 4.0 4.0 4.0
Stream processors 1,600 1,600 1440 3,200 480 240 240
GPU clock speed (MHz) 925 850 725 725 576 648 633
Shader clock speed (MHz) 925 850 725 725 1,242 1,474 1,404
Memory clock speed (MHz) 5,000 4,800 4,000 4,000 2,016 2,484 2,276
Memory bus width (bits) 256 256 256 256 x 2 448 x 2 512 448
CPU Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition (3.20GHz, 8MB L3 cache, quad-core, LGA1366 - Turbo Boost on)
Motherboard ASUS P6X58D Premium
Motherboard BIOS 0703
Mainboard software Intel Inf 9.1.1.1025
Memory 6GB Crucial DDR3-1,067 CL7
Memory timings and speed 7-7-7-20 1T @ DDR3-1,066
PSU Corsair HX1000W
Monitor Dell 30in 3007WFP - 2,560x1,600px
Disk drive(s) Kingston SSDNow V+ 128GB SSD
Graphics driver Catalyst 10.3a Catalyst 10.3a Catalyst 10.3a Catalyst 10.3a ForceWare 197.13 ForceWare 197.13 ForceWare 197.13
Operating system Windows 7 Ultimate, 64-bit

Software


Benchmarks DiRT 2 v1.1, London map - ultra quality
Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X v1.2, internal benchmark: DX10/10.1 - high quality
Far Cry 2 v1.03 - very high quality
Crysis Warhead v1.1.1.711 - train map - enthusiast quality

Power-draw
Temperatures
HEXUS.bang4buck
Overclocking

Notes

Benchmarks were conducted at 1,680x1,050, 1,920x1,200, and 2,560x1,600, where applicable, with decent degrees of image quality.

We've tested with the very latest drivers available from both companies in the run-up to GeForce GTX 480/470. The Catalyst 10.3a set, benchmarked here, show a significant increase in performance in DiRT 2 DX11 and H.A.W.X.

DiRT 2 has also been updated to v1.1 since the last slew of tests. The patch appears to provide better performance for NVIDIA GPUs.