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Overclocking and Power Consumption: After the pleasant experience that was the HD5770, I was looking forward to the headroom provided by HD5870. In this case, the limitations of Overdrive proved to be a little too restricting, as the max supported capability of the card's BIOS is only 900MHz on the core and 1300MHz on the memory. Given the stock clocks of 850MHz and 1200MHz, 50MHz and 100MHz, it seems a bit stingy. Until there is support from RivaTuner or some other software tool to break these limits, the end user is limited to flashing the BIOS to another brand of card. Of course, that goes beyond the scope of this particular review, but the information is out there if you want to take the risk. Of course, if I am complaining about this, this means that I have had no issue hitting the maximum allowed overclock of 900MHz/1300MHz, which is a good sign, and I will shortly be attempting to push past these limits. Let's take a look at how the overclocks helped: Vantage Performance:
On the overclocked 5870, we see a 5.2% increase in score. Vantage High:
For the High Preset, the overclock boosts the score by 4.7% Vantage Extreme:
At the Extreme setting, the score is increased by 6.7% 3DMark06:
Finally, in 3DMark06, overclocking boosts scores by 1.4%. These are pretty paltry gains considering what the 4890 and 5770 has gotten me used to. A potential positive note is going to be in power consumption, however, as like the HD5770, the HD5870 is on a smaller process node. On top of that, the HD5870 has half the memory as the HD4870X2, which should prove to be substantially more efficient.
The Idle test is defined by sitting at the Windows desktop without any work being done. Load is defined as the end of three loops of the Crysis: Warhead bench at 2560x1200, 8xAA. Measurement is performed at the socket with a Kill-A-Watt meter. Interestingly, the HD5870 has the same Idle consumption as the HD5770, and that's a good thing. It also consumes 50W less at idle than the 4870X2, and an amazing 116W less at full load. Now that is an improvement my wallet can appreciate! In a lot of ways, this HD5870 review appears to be almost the exact opposite of the HD5770 review. For example, while the 5770 was expected to compete with the HD4890 and fell short, the HD5870 was expected to be a drop in replacement for the 4870X2, and it has matched that expectation rather well. On the other hand, while the HD5770 made impressive gains in overclocking, the HD5870 was hamstrung by BIOS limitations that are only serving to limit its potential. While that may be an interesting observation, I really want to focus in on how it stacks up to the HD4870X2. In most of the benchmarks, the margin between the two cards is nearly indistinguishable. The only exceptions to this are the older benchmarks where the HD4870X2 pulls ahead, and in Crysis:Warhead, where the extra memory bandwidth is obviously giving the HD5870 a distinct advantage. I don't know about you, but I know which one I care about, and thus I give the performance crown to the HD5870 by a nose. Of course, the same advantages that we highlighted for the HD5770 also apply to the HD5870, including excellent power savings, enhanced Blu-Ray support, DX11 support, and some nice bundled games as well. The only thing holding back the complete and utter success of this launch is the intermittent availability of these cards on the retail market. I hate to say "paper launch", and I am sure ATI hates to hear it, but the lack of availability has been a bit of a thorn in both the HD5870 and the HD5850. Cards are finally becoming available again this week, with Newegg having a few brands available, and AMD stating that availability is "hand in mouth" for the time being. Otherwise, ATI has really jumped to an early lead against nVidia, and it is good to see them firing on all cylinders again. Pros:
Cons:
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