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ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB
Conclusion
Better adaptive anti-aliasing, better video playback, better performance, and priced in reach for anyone who wants one--seriously, for less than four hundred dollars, given how cheap everything else is now, anyone can afford it--the HD 5870 is the card to get for gaming performance, performance/ watt, low noise... there’s a whole host of good reasons. For people looking for a valid, future-proof option, DX 11 and Direct Compute are open standards that will serve for a good long time, and for home theater types, HDMI 1.3a finally brings lossless audio across the board. And that EyeFinity jazz is pretty sexy. What’s the hang-up? This might actually be too much video card. It’s certainly not mainstream and at 1680x1050, even with anti-aliasing cranked up, this card is bottlenecked by average hardware. If you’re looking to replace just your video card and get screaming performance, consider the 5850, due shortly. This hardware’s best fitted with a shiny new i5, i7, or Phenom II rig, and even then, those clocked high. And you know the price is going to come down when NVIDIA rolls out their DX11 hardware, if you don't mind waiting for it. That said, this single-GPU card matches or beats the last generation’s dual-GPU setups, and tops them all feature-wise. Which at its price, gets it props. Coming up: the HD 5870, at high-res, high AA, and with Windows 7.  Pros  Best single-GPU performance Huge improvement, nearly 100% over 4870 Insignificant idle power, low noise all-around DirectX 11 First! Cons  High power consumption at full load Needs matching high-end hardware to appreciate fully
Page 1: Introduction, The Card & Bundle
Page 2: Specifications and Setup Page 3: DirectX 10 Titles Page 4: DX9, OpenGL, and Synthetics Page 5: Video, Power, and Overclocking Page 6: Conclusion 
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