Let's take a look at ATI's next generation directX 11 offering. From XFX, the ATI Radeon™ HD 5870. Powered by 40nm Cypress XT core packing a whooping 2.15 billion transistors, some 1600 Stream Processor and 32 Raster Operation Units. And coupled with some of the lastest technology from ATI, which we'll have a closer look later.

XFX had only begun making ATI based graphics solutions early this year, as it was previously a NVIDIA exclusive manufacturer, which meant they only made graphics card which came with a NVIDIA GPUs, also they were famous for XXX editions of various NVIDIA graphics cards which where factory overclocked, and used better components for the circuitry, making those cards faster and more reliable. 

When it comes to the ATI segment of their product lineup, they have followed what they did to the NVIDIA cards. For instance, the ATI Radeon™ HD 4890 Black Edition which they made, were factory overclocked to 1Ghz for the Gpu, when the default for the reference design was only 850mhz. With that in mind, there will be surely more interesting ATI based graphics cards in the future from XFX.

The HD 5870 is identical to its predecessor the HD 4890 with both GPUs clocked @ 850mhz. However, the HD 5870 core pushes out a mind blowing 2.72 TeraFLOPS of computing power while the older HD 4890 give only a mere 1.36 TeraFLOPS. To put things into perspective, the Intel i7 965 quad core processor, gives only 70+ odd GigaFLOPS. Food for thought though, 2.72 TeraFLOPS for the HD 5870, is pretty close to the dual GPU HD 4870 X2. However the HD 4870 X2 costs more.

The HD 5870 Gpu is made using a 40nm process, unlike it predecessor which had 55nm. Being 40nm, the HD 5870 has a lower TDP then the HD 4890 and will probably runs cooler then the 4890. There will be a in-depth look into the power consumption and operating temperatures of the HD 5870 in the later part of the review.

Other then DirectX 11, The ATI Radeon™ HD 5870 has a new technology worth mentioning. ATI Eyefinity™. it allows up to 6, yes six monitors to be connected to the graphics card, in either clone or extended modes. with a theoretical maximum resolution of 8192 x 8192. But is this case, The HD 5870 we recieved, only allows a maximum of 3 monitors. which will get you about 7680 x 1600 if u place all monitors horizontally. 

The table below shows the Specifications of the HD 5870 along with other cards out in the market now for your comparison.

Again, the HD 5870 is very competitively priced, but the question is does it performs? more importantly, how will it perform against graphics card that are already out in the market?

But first, some photos of the HD 5870.