AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870: Unquestionably Number One

Name: AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870: Unquestionably Number One - Page 12
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, September 23, 2009, 12:00 AM EDT

With a 2.15 billion transistor, ultra-complex 40nm GPU at the heart of the card, we were curious to see how much frequency headroom the Radeon HD 5870 had left under its virtual hood. So, for our next set of performance metrics, we spent some time overclocking the new Radeon HD 5870 using the Overdrive utility built into ATI's Catalyst drivers.

Overclocking The Radeon HD 5870

Pedal To The Metal

At this point, at least as far as our early reference sample is concerned, it looks like the Radeon HD 5870 doesn't have much frequency headroom left. Of course, that could change when AMD's board partners launch products with tweaked voltages, coolers, BIOSes, etc.

With that said, we were able to take our Radeon HD 5870 up to a stable 890MHz for its GPU and 1290MHz (1.29GHz) for its GDDR5 memory, up from its stock 850MHz and 1200MHz, respectively. With the card overclocked, we re-ran a couple of benchmarks at a resolution of 1920x1200 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x aniso enabled and saw some modest performance gains.

We'll revisit the topic of Radeon HD 5870 overclocking when we get in some cards from third-party AIB manufacturers to see if the story changes at some point in the future.

Tags: AMD, ATI, Gaming, DirectX, graphics, GPU, PCI Express, PCIe, dx11

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com