Asus EAH5870 Radeon HD 5870 Review

Like AMD's reference Radeon HD 5870, the Asus EAH5870 card is 10.5" long and features a black fan shroud that encases the entire PCB.

The card's cooler has a barrel fan that draws air into the shroud, where it is forced through the heatsink and partially exhausted from the system through vents in the card's mounting plate. Two more small vents at the back of the card also direct some air that's ultimately vented within the system. Overall, the cooling solution is much like the one used on the Radeon HD 4890, although it is somewhat quieter during idle and light-load conditions.

The Asus EAH5870 has a stock GPU clock of 850MHz with a memory clock speed of 1.2 GHz (4.8Gbps effective)--that equates to roughly 153.6GB/sec of peak memory bandwidth. By using Asus' SmartDoctor utility, however, significantly increasing both core and memory clock speeds is a definitely possibility. More on that topic in the overclocking section towards the end.

As you can see, two 6-pin PCIe power connectors are required for the EAH5870 and outputs on the card consist of dual, dual-link DVI outputs, an HDMI output (with audio) and a DisplayPort output. As is the case with all other Radeon HD 5000 series cards, the EAH5870 supports a variety of triple-monitor ATI Eyefinity configurations by using any combination of three outputs--provided at least one of them is the DisplayPort output.