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ASUS EAH5870 Video Card Review

Today we look at ASUS’s brand new, voltage tweakable and highly overclockable EAH5870 based on AMD’s new ATI Radeon HD 5870. With the ability to increase the core voltage we cannot wait to see how high it will go, but first we must see how it compares to its rivals in some of the latest and most demanding games.

System Test Setup

For our test system platform we are using an ASUS Blitz Formula motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor at 3.66GHz, and 4GB of OCZ Technology DDR2 PC2-8000 Platinum. For the power supply, we will be using a Corsair TX750W.

While it might be a bit "overkill," we use the 3.6GHz overclocked quad-core processor in an attempt to keep from putting our evaluation into a position of being CPU limited. Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the 3.6GHz processor seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

For this evaluation Windows 7 x64 RTM will be used. We are using the latest drivers for the ASUS EAH5870 and ATI Radeon HD 4890 provided by AMD, which are Catalyst 8.66.6 Beta 2 dated October 7th. We have the ForceWare 191.07 WHQL driver installed for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285.

Below is the GPU-Z screenshot of the ASUS EAH5870 after we installed the drivers

Evaluation Method

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and "eye candy" graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home . Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing based on real gameplay as well.