After last week's exhilarating look at Sapphire's HD5770, I was definitely chomping at the bit to see what the HD5870 could do.  We all know that technology progresses at a break-neck pace, and it is always a joy to see the progression first hand.  The RV870-based HD5870 promises to continue the fabled legacy of Moore's Law, giving us a card with similar capabilities as the venerated HD4870X2 all within a single chip.  Which brings us to today, as we have a chance to take an in-depth look at the Sapphire HD5870.  This version of the  RV870 chip, named Cypress is practically a doubling of the HD4870, thus it is no surprise that the single chip HD5870 is expected as capable as the HD4870X2.  Shall we take a closer look?

Specifications:

If we look at the above chart, its not hard to see why the HD5870 is expected to be on par with the 4870X2.  All the specs are identical except for the fact that the 4870X2 has 2GB of RAM while the 5870 has 1GB.  Of course, the true framebuffer of the 4870X2 is 1GB per core, so it really is not all that different. 

• DirectX 11 Support

• ATI Eyefinity Technology, with support for three displays

• ATI Stream Technology

• Windows 7 Support

• 2nd Generation TeraScale Engine

• PCI-e 2.0 x16

• HDMI 1.3 support with Deep Color and 7.1 High Bitrate Audio, supporting bitstreaming for all Blu-Ray codecs, including Dolby TrueHD and DTSHD-Master Audio.

• On chip HDCP support

• CrossfireX support for up to four discrete cards on an AMD 790FX based motherboard

• Avivo HD support for decoding HD video, Blu-Ray, DVD Upscaling, and audio over HDMI

• Dynamic power management for both core clocks and memory clocks

Of course, a lot of these specs apply to the entire RV8xx product family, so many of the things that we talked about last week for the HD5770 also apply to the HD5870, including the advanced Blu-Ray codecs.  Of course, the HD5870 will be much more suited for an extreme Eyefinity setup, however, the support for six panels will come later with a special 2GB edition of the HD5870.