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Here is the new King, the HIS HD5870.  The outer casing of the card gives it a clean and sleek appearance.  Under the hood is a copper heatpipe cooler with the channeled venting to keep the HD5870 GPU cool.  The HD5870 also has some significant architectural changes.  It is built with the new 40nm milling process as opposed to the HD4870 which was made at 55nm.  Another difference is that the HD5870 processor sports 2.15 BILLION transistors.  This absolutely blows away the previous generation of HD4870s with their 956 million transistors.  Another big bonus with the new GPU architecture is that the HD5870 is reported to draw 188 watts maximum and idle at 27 watts.  For comparison, the HD4870 pulled 160 watts max which is less but its idle pull was a whopping 90 watts.

Efficient cooling is performance cooling.  HIS utilizes the ATi reference design of a fully encased card as we just showed you.  A variable speed turbine type fan acts as our air intake.  The fan speed is governed off an internal thermal probe/rheostat.  ATi has gotten better with their variable speed cooling fans with each successive generation of cards.  Way back when; with the 2900XT in 2007, that card's fan would spin up to dust buster level full honk frequently.  The current HD5870 at no time during testing (and we did A LOT of fragging) did the fan spin over 50% speed.  The increased velocity of air flow created by the fully encased HD5870 makes air exchange smooth, efficient and most importantly as quiet as possible.

Flipping the HD5870 on its back we see that even the underside of the card is covered.  This plastic base plate seems to me like it would increase the card's operation temperature.  If it did, it was never apparent to us.

Yes, the HD5970 is a big card.  Measuring a full 11 inches, the HD5870 is every bit the same size of the rest of the top tier behemoth pixel punchers on the market right now.

Along the visible side (when installed) of the card is ATI Radeon impressed into a red plastic insert laid into the black outer casing.

On the forward end is a small vent areas immediately above the two CrossfireX posts.  I'm anxious already about testing.  Thinking about two of these cards in Crossfire is just too much for me to think about right now.  On the back end of the side are two 6-pin PCI-E power plugs.  The milling process and idle power draw are definitely down however at full honk the HD5870 pulls a stated 188 watts.

 

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