Image Quality

Judging image quality is about 'beauty in the eye of the beholder'.  What we do here is load up the eye candy right up to the limit of keeping a game playable.  The last meaning keeping above the 30fps mark.  The Human Eye can only track a maximum of 30 frames per second.  The benefit of having the horsepower to run 60, 90 or 100 is so when action loads up the GPU, there is plenty of buffer between the viewed images speed and that dreaded 30fps line.  Loading Far Cry 2 back up at the settings of 1920 x 1440 with 8x FSAA and all other features set to 'Very High' and 'Ultra High' identical to our benchmark run gives some outstanding graphics.  Judge for yourself.

Overclocking

Stock settings on the HIS HD5870 are 850MHz on the core and 4.8GHz on the memory (1200MHz x 4).  Within a couple of minutes we were at a max of 890MHz on the core and 5.16GHz (1290MHz x 4) on the memory.  Throwing Far Cry 2 back in we took our 5GHz of memory speed out for a little walk.

Results

Not a huge gain but roughly 5% all the same.  I believe that with a program other than the Overdrive within the Catalyst driver set may be able to do better.

Conclusion

To say we were impressed with the HIS HD5870 would be quite an understatement.  The HIS HD5870 brings raw performance to the table while at the same time pushing the technology envelope with support gamers will readily use.  I'm talking about DirectX 11 support in Windows 7 and ATi's Eyefinity.  These two items give the HD5800 series of cards instant staying power with features not soon to be going anywhere.  That is also the downside as we don't have any real DirectX 11 game titles on the market now either.  HIS and ATi look to correct this for card purchasers with the decision to include a downloadable copy of Dirt2 when its released mush as they did in 2007 with Half Life. 

In our performance testing, I had thought the deck may have been stacked against the HD5870 with our testing it against a HD4870x2.  Twice the computational power so ATi said, so we tested and come to find out that the HD5870 is not marketing hype but rather a gamer's dream.  Adding in the estimated street price of being under $400, the HIS HD5870 represents a killer performance bargain.  The game has changed indeed.

Pros

• KAPOW! performance

• Quiet operation

• Supports ATi Eyefinity

• Supports ATi Stream

• Supports DirectX 11

• Dual DVI, HDMI and a Display port

• Excellent image quality

• CrossFireX Ready

• Included Coupon for Dirt2

• Draws only 27 watts at idle (per white paper)

• Lots of power for an estimated $400 price point

• Should be readily available for Christmas

Cons

• None

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