XFX HD5870 Black Edition Review

XFX have undertaken a new cooler design with their Black Edition and it would be remiss of us not to thoroughly analyse the benefits the consumer will experience if they opted for the more expensive, faster model. After all none of us want a slightly faster gaming experience with more heat and noise – If you have missed our look at the Black Edition cooling system then please backtrack to page 4 of this review. We measure noise from around 12 inches from the chassis.

XFX claims of a significantly improved cooler certainly have merit and we can see the benefits reaped by the enhanced model they have implemented on the Black Edition HD5870 card. Under full load it is noticeable and we are impressed with the end result.

The cooler is also showing significant improvements when compared to the reference design, we measured temperatures 10c cooler than the ATI reference design. After taking the card apart we had a good idea this would be the case, but it is nice to see it affirmed throughout stress testing.

For some people XFX's settings will not be enough so we manually pushed the card as far as possible and settled on results of 985 core and 1340 memory – which is a sizable increase. Overclocking to this level added 5c to the load temperatures and another 3db as the cooler compensated – which is STILL less than the reference design at the reference clocks. Extremely impressive set of results all round for the Black Edition card.

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