AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870 DirectX 11 GPU Review

Now this is what I'm talking about. That Spanish review on Tom's Hardware was a little difficult to understand, lol.

One of the things that struck right off the bat was the idle power usage, much lower than any of the other cards tested. The 5870 delivers the best bang per watt and is the best performing single GPU solution on the market. And the price point of $379 is brilliant move by ATI (some sub-$300 should be had this holiday season).

If I can get one of these mommas for under $300, I'll do it, even though I don't have a system to put it in.

Are you sure this is a GPU? I don't see any pictures of Batman characters on it.

That thing is a hoss of a card. And not bad on the numbers even slightly behind the gtx 295 and that is a dual gpu card set.

One unexpected thing that really stuck me as impressive was the power consumption.  Right around 4890 or 285 level... nice.

Of course the performance is the main thing.  Freaking incredible for single GPU and it spanks the crap out of the GTX 285 despite only costing around $30-$55 more.  And why pay $80+ more for the GTX 295 when it's barely faster (or in many cases not faster)?  ATi is back on top and without price gouging like some other companies have been known to do ($650 video card in June 2008, anyone?).

With the system requirements of most PC games only very gradually improving, one of these would be all someone needs for quite a bit - though people demanding Crysis perfection will want to pick up 2.

Yesterday, CyberPowerPC offered these cards in their custom system configurators. Of course, it takes a little while for them to build you a systm, so I guess they would have waited till today to plug in the GPU.

Newegg has several versions available for the MSRP of $380. I agree with the sentiment that it's a decent price for what you get, though I'll still wait to pick one up (pre- and post-holiday sales and maybe Xmas presents, if Mom takes the hint).

I won't pay the new tax, but will wait for a month or two to get one at a more reasonable price. This is a slick Video Card and I can't wait to try it out! ATI does it again.

Hi All

Excellent Review.

AMD/ATI really outdid themselves with this GPU.

They not only increased performance, but also introduced a host of new features as well.

It'll be intersting to see how Nvidia responds.

Well, looks like i'm still safe with my GTX295... no need to upgrade yet :-D

In the short term NVIDIA will respond with price cuts, in the long term, expect a killer new GPU...

Yeah - gotta love competition! :)

Good looking card, but my 275gtxs are sitting pretty still

All Linux guys choose NVidia for three reasons:

* ATi drivers are generally poor quality and even worse in Linux;

* ATi is randomly dropping support even for video cards that are still shipping and not updating legacy drivers to keep up with the times;

* ATi has all kinds of horrible blunders in Linux drivers that cause most games to have serious issues, even WoW does not work right half the time.

Bottom line - ATi might have the greatest hardware, but unless they fix their software, they are pretty screwed.

I can't disagree (I prefer nVidia cards in my Linux boxes for the very reasons you cited), but the ATI situation is improving now that ATI opened up their docs (which nVidia has yet to do):

- 2.6.32 has open source kernel mode setting and 3D support for newer ATI cards.

- The 5870 should work with the already released 9.9 drivers, as opposed to the situation where I've bought a brand new nVidia card (9600GT) and had to wait over two months for them to release a proprietary Linux driver.

- The ATI drivers are performing more in line with their Windows counterparts nowadays.  It used to be really atrocious though:  I remember years back when I had a GF4400 and  ATI9600XT card:  On windows the ATI would win in the benchmarks... under Linux the ATI would run at about 1/3rd speed of the nVidia card.

So, if the trend of improvement from ATI continues, it's not improbable that we won't see the competition in the Linux sector get a bit tighter... with all the resulting consumer benefits.  :)

holy crap look at that thing are they sure its a GPU not a small computer

Hey, wait a second... if you turn it on it's side it does look a bit like a HAL 9000.

It totally looks like the original batmobile...click the link in the intro.

Lol... it does, now that I clicked on the "snagged that idea" link.

When I was a kid, I saw the batmobile at a car show... and got Yvonne Craig's autograph.... ahhh... good times.

The GTX was in many cases faster than the ATI 5870. But at the same time it had much higher power requirments and costs more. Remember, we'll be seeing 5870 X2's soon as well. Nate's review over at legit reviews shows the 5870's potention in crossfire config. It looked pretty damned impressive.