Overclocked: Our Custom Radeon HD 5870 Roundup
by Ryan Smith on May 19, 2010 11:53 AM ESTOverclocked Performance
Now that we’ve settled the matter of how overclockable our cards are, let’s take a look at their overclocked performance. For these benchmarks our cards are clocked at the following:
Sapphire Toxic 2GB: 900/1250
MSI Lighting: 940/1300
Gigabyte Super Overclock: 950/1325
With our slight overclocks in place, we pick up between 4% in performance for the Sapphire and Gigabyte cards to 7% for the MSI card. More often than not the Gigabyte card still edges out the Sapphire card thanks to the former’s greater memory overclock, but of course the Sapphire still wins in all situations where 2GB of RAM provides a tangible benefit.
Overall their overclocks are all close enough to each other that the performance difference is splitting peanuts – the difference comes out to fractions of a frame per second much of the time. So there’s a clear winner in the Gigabyte card when going by the numbers, but the MSI and Sapphire cards are not appreciably slower.
All told, overclocking has improved the performance of these cards to between 9% and 10% over a reference 5870. 10% more on a 5870 is a fairly important number, and we’ll get in to that more at the end of this review.
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bobsmith1492 - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
As an electrical engineer, I wouldn't want to buy a card that is clocked so close to it usable limit. It's just begging for premature failures, especially at such high temperatures. A few months of dust build up and these cards will be pushing 120C, typically the level where components' lifespans are drastically reduced. I hope I'm wrong but I can't see video cards pushing much more horsepower without some serious form factor modifications.The0ne - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
Nope, most enthusiasts believe their system will run free of dirt and grime for years and years and temperatures will stay the same. Once a part is tainted it becomes harder and harder to have it stay cleaned :) Take CPU fan for example hahahaiamezza - Thursday, May 20, 2010 - link
Old toothbrushes work brilliantly for cleaning dusty fans and heatsinks - to a 'good as new' state ;)Folterknecht - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
Hi Ryan!What BIOS did your GB HD5870 use? There are two availeble "F2" and "F3". From discussions in the german GB-Support-Forum regarding GB HD 5850 OC, which is using the same cooler as far as I can tell, new BIOS-Versions were created to deal with some issues including noise.
There have been many angry posts, because GB advertised this cooler as "SUPER SILENT"!
If your test sample used "F2" an update to "F3" and eventual changes in idle characteristics would be interesting, if the test sample is still available.
Thanks for this interesting review
Folterknecht
cactusdog - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
Gigabyte cant make a decent OC card. Just like their 4870 with the one speed noisy zalman fan and no fan adjustment. They just dont get it.I had high hopes for this new 5870 version but looks like they screwed up again. Apparently they released the card with one clock mode (flat out) no 2D clocks, no UVD clocks, just max clocks. As the previous poster said ,maybe the card in this review has the original bios.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
We're using the F3 BIOS.NinjaGnome - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
I wish they would offer a card that either included a waterblock or came with no heatsink at all so the user can choose a waterblock or aftermarket cooler. I dont want to pay for an expensive oc version just to throw the block away so I can throw a waterblock on it.sirizak - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
Here you go: http://www.powercolor.com/us/products_features.asp...Also if you want to add aftermarket cooling I would suggest buying a reference card (with the full shroud, fan at the rear and AMD printed above the PCIe Connnector) most aftermarket cooler manufacturers are only supporting the reference design.
sirizak - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
Something I think this review missed was VRM cooling on these non-reference cards, the reference HD 5870 provides superior VRM cooling compared to most non-reference cards and allows for Voltage Control. I have managed 950Mhz Core Stable on my reference card without adding any voltage.I would have loved to see some VRM temps for each card under load, and perhaps a description of the type of VRM cooling they are offering.
Other than that great review, I was tossing up about the MSI and Gigabyte when I was purchasing so I found this really interesting, if a little late for my decision making :)
Ryan Smith - Thursday, May 20, 2010 - link
Unfortunately none of these cards are using VRMs that our existing tools can read temperatures from. This was particularly frustrating with the Gigabyte card, as we could see it throttling but couldn't see the temperature that was triggering it.