XFX HD5870 Black Edition Review

The XFX HD5870 Black Edition features numerous enhancements over the reference design and the image below shows the differences between the cards with a more substantial cooling heatsink placed in a centralised position.

There are also larger heatpipes and thankfully XFX have realised that the fan design needed improving – the larger fan positioning will also help with airflow dramatically across the physical area.

As the diagram above shows – the horizontal plane receives significantly more cooling from the larger fan. XFX have also added a heatsink/Dr. Mos which offers further stability improvements and lower temperatures.

XFX have been very keen to point out that this design also incorporates a solid capacitor overhaul which leads to a longer life time span with increased stability and improved reliability as well as ensuring no capacitors will ‘explode'. Additional benefits include higher levels of overclocking capability.

Last but not least they are using Samsung high speed memory on the board which ensures stable overclocked performance levels during even the most intense gaming sessions.

The card runs at a 900mhz Core clock with memory running at 5Gbps. It comes supplied with 1GB of GDDR5. Underneath the cooler we have ATIs 40nm Cypress core which has 32 ROPS and 1600 Unified Shaders. The card uses a 256-bit memory bus with 1GB of GDDR5 and like all 5870s it is compatible with PCI-Express 2.1. All standard ATI 5000 series features are present including support for DirectX 11, Shader Model 5, Direct Compute, HDMI 1.3a (DTS Master Audio/Dolby True-HD) and Blu-Ray acceleration.

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