Sapphire HD5870 1GB GDDR5 Pro Reviews

The card is a bit pricey but the upcoming HD 5850 will surely change that. Besides, you can always wait for the price drops. Be it as it may, this card is the fastest single-GPU offering on the market, and currently the only DX11 supporting card, and if you're looking for any of these two things then Sapphire HD 5870 is not only the right, but only choice you currently have.

ATI has a hit with the Radeon HD 5870 as it is the only card along with the HD 5850 coming next week to fully support Microsoft’s DirectX 11 until either the end of the year or next year. The Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 card is clocked at the default clock speeds which provide plenty of performance for every game out there today and if you want more performance get a second card. This card comes with a coupon for Dirt 2 which is the first DirectX 11 game coming in December. As this the only HD 5870 card I have reviewed and it performs almost as fast as a GTX295 which is NVIDIA’s dual GPU card and faster than the GTX285 which was the previous fastest card on the market, I give the Sapphire card the Editor’s Choice for those wanting a fast video card with support for the future DirectX 11 games and support for Eyefinity, allowing up to 3 monitors to be utilized at the same time on this card.

Nonetheless, the performance is unmistakable, and the card's sheer throughput is backed with the inherent goodness of DirectX 11 compliance - which, as we've stated before, brings its own bag of goodies to boot, including mandated hardware tessellation and the useful DirectCompute shader for GPGPU duties.

The AMD Radeon HD 5870 is, arguably, the best consumer graphics card that money can buy right now, but we temper this statement with the knowledge that, over a month on from release, supply remains in considerable constraint. Augmented by a slightly better-than-reference bundle, we reckon the package is just about worth the extra outlay if you have your heart set on a Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB card.

When it comes to performance, the card performed up to our expectations. Sure, the factory overclocking might be a tad on the conservative side, but since this isn't a Toxic or Atomic edition, we will let that slide pass. So if you have cash to splash and want the absolute best, the Sapphire HD 5870 Vapor-X is a good bet that performs to its billing.

We see across the board in all games the HD 5870 put's out some fantastic numbers, be it in the synthetic 3DMark Vantage or the ultra intensive and ultra popular Far Cry 2. I expected the HD 5870 to perform well, mainly because it needed to, but I didn't expect it to perform this well.

We really made the HD 5870 CrossFire setup work as well.

With all that said and done, it's very hard to fault the HD 5870 Vapor-X OC from Sapphire. The simple fact is we've got better cooling numbers, less noise and more performance than the stock model. Sapphire has also helped add a second game to the package to make it stand out that little bit more.

Without a doubt, Sapphire’s Vapor-X is the current torch bearer for a new generation of HD 5870 cards that will offer increased performance, cooling and even longevity over their reference brethren. While there may still be some nagging doubts about availability and final retailer pricing, if you are looking for a HD 5870 the Vapor-X version is the one you should be looking at. As such, it receives our Dam Good Award.

To sum this up on a more personal note, I have to pay the HD 5870 the highest compliment I can bestow on any piece of hardware by saying that I wouldn’t hesitate to use it in my own system. It truly is a technological marvel and we can only hope at this point that AMD / ATI carries through with their promise to bring OpenCL applications to their GPUs.