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Another review from us here at Laptop-Review, this time of a high-end graphics card.
ASUSTeK Computer Incorporated, more commonly known as Asus, was established on April 2nd 1989 and is currently the largest motherboard maker in the world.
However, Asus makes more than just motherboards and are well-known for the video cards and innovation with regards to BIOS, drivers and software.
In 2008, Asus sold 24m motherboards, corresponding to a market share of almost 40%.

Asus’ product group covers practically all areas of hardware you might imagine. Furthermore, Asus is an OEM and ODM producer for esteemed companies like Apple, Alienware/Dell, Palm and HP.

The product was kindly lent to us by Asus.com

The GPU we will be looking at today comes from the new ATi 5800 series and has been dubbed Asus EA 5870.
On paper, this should one of the fastest graphics cards in the world.
Let us see what it has to offer, but first we will cover some of the new technologies this graphics card is equipped with.

Innovation/Technology

Some of the key features the new ATi HD5800 series is equipped with are:

•    ATI Eyefinity technology with support for up to six displays
•    ATI Stream technology
•    Designed for DirectCompute 5.0 and OpenCL
•    Supports OpenGL 3.1
•    DirectX 11
•    Shader model 5.0
•    Multi-threading
•    DirectCompute 11 - Physics and AI
•    Hardware Tessellation
•    Better shadows
•    HDR Texture compression

DirectX 11
We finally got a new DirectX technology. Most game developers skipped DX10 entirely, as it was quite similar to DX9 in terms of graphics, and why throw money at something that fails to improve anything?
DX11 is a great step in the right direction for both developers and gamers, which is good news for all of us. Developers have an opportunity to make the games faster and more visually appealing with new shaders, which means gamers get to enjoy games that are superior in both performance and looks.

Multi-threading
Just as with modern processors and programs, you can now send codes and datasheets to the GPU multi-threaded. This is called multi-threaded rendering and results in greater efficiency. You might compare it with a bunch of cars that need to get from point A to point B; by creating additional lanes, they all get there faster.



DirectCompute 11
This is one of the more exciting things DX11 brings along. In short, DirectCompute is a function that allows developers to use the GPU for tasks which were previously carried out by the CPU.
Developers can use computer shaders, DirectCompute and DX11 to add new technologies that can be used to improve graphics quality in for example games, or they can be used for non-graphical programs and tasks like video transcoding, video upscaling and physics simulations.

Shader model 5.0
DX11 also introduces shader model 5 for High Level Shader Language (HLSL). That makes it easier for graphics programmers to add shader programs. Another addition is double-precision support, which allows programmers to deal with shader specialisation via polymorphism, objects and interfaces.

ATI Eyefinity
ATIEyefinity is another new function introduced along with the HD5800 series. This function basically makes it possible to use up to six monitors per graphics card. So, you can create a setup with six display, each running 1920 x 1200, which should melt the heart of any gamer.
99% of those who will end up buying an ATI 5800 card will probably never use this function, but the 1% who do are in for an extraordinary experience.

Specifications



•    1GB GDDR5
•    PCI Express 2.1
•    850 MHz GPU clock
•    ATI Eyefinity
•    4.8 GHz RAM speed (1.2 GHz DDR5)
•    2x DVI
•    1x Display Port
•    1x HDMI

Accessories

•    DVI to VGA adapter
•    1x Crossfire cable
•    1x Power cable
•    Asus utilities and drivers
•    Colin Mcrae Dirt 2

Category
The standard user or gamer who wants a high-end GPU with DX11

Warranty
Asus provides a 3-year warranty on this GPU

Price
Around £300

Power supply requirements
ATI recommends that you at the very least use a 500 watt power supply with two 6-pin PCI-E jacks, and at least a 700 watt power supply if you want to run crossfire.
Important!
The card is very long, measuring 28 cm, and weighs about 1kg, so do check if it will actually fit in your case before you buy it. Additionally, fasten it with two screws if possible.

Design/Layout

Now the time has come to open up the huge box the card ships in, and see what is what. The box comes with some dark, ominous colours and with some sort of warrior at the front. Some of the most important features of the card are also shown at the front as well.



At the rear of the box you will find more information about the product.



Upon opening the box, you will see Asus has made an effort to make the interior special. The entire interior is split up into smaller compartments with the card itself separated from CDs and cables which is a nice little detail, and not something you see other companies do.



The graphics card is found at the bottom of the box, and this is what it looks like in all its glory.



If we turn it around a bit, the first thing of note is that the entire posterior is covered by a black plate. At the bottom left are the two crossfire bridge connectors.



On the side of the card you find the two 6-pin PCI-E jacks.



The card follows the reference design from ATI and comes with a very large cooler to keep the card cold. The guys who designed the cooler probably watched a lot of Batman movies, because the cooler looks an awful lot like a Batmobile.
At the rear of the card are the two large air ducts which the fan uses to draw in the cold air and blow it over the cooling profile.  



At the front of the card are three different ports as well as another air duct which is used to expel the hot air.



If we take off the cooler, we can see how big it actually is. It is not really an easy task – first you have to take out a lot of screws located in the strangest of places; it is quite annoying but hey, how often will you have to do it?
First you have to take off the plate that covers the entire posterior of the card, after which you can unscrew the screws keeping the cooler in place. After that you can loosen the four screws around the GPU. 

This is what it looks like once it comes off.



Now we can clearly see what is actually on the card. The first thing you see is the GPU, which in this case is the new 40nm chip codenamed cypress. Incidentally you find the same chip on the HD5850 card, albeit in a toned down edition.



If we turn the card around once, we can see that the cover serves no greater function than to enhance the design. There are no RAM chips or anything at the rear that needs to be cooled.



As noted already, the card is very long. To give you an idea of just how long, here it is along with an ATI HD5770.

Software

Asus bundle many different kinds of software with their graphics cards, but the two most interesting are GamerOSD and their overclocking program – Smartdoctor.

GamerOSD
GamerOSD is basically a program that allows the user to take realtime pictures and video in games. It is also possible to overclock GPUs via GamerOSD while you are gaming.


Smartdoctor
As noted above, Asus Smartdoctor is the overclocking tool for the GPUs. It is possible to adjust both GPU voltage, GPU MHz and RAM MHz with the three sliders, after which you simply click OK to activate the chosen speed and voltage.
With this program you can increase GPU voltage to 1.5, GPU speed to 1200MHz and RAM speed up to DDR5600. Smartdoctor also has a clever function called Asus hyperdrive. With this enabled, you can choose between three different settings, each of which is capable of increasing the speed of both GPU and RAM, depending on how much or how little work the GPU has to do.



Let us move on to the test setup and the important benchmark results in which the card really flexes it muscles.

Test setup

Motherboard
MSI Eclipse SLI X58

CPU
Intel Core I7 950 (4200 MHz 200*21 with water cooling)

RAM
G.Skill Trident PC3-16000 3*2 gb

Storage
Samsung Spinpoint F1 160 GB

GPU
Asus HD5870 1GB

Sapphire HD5770 1GB (crossfire)

XFX HD4770 512 MB

Power supply
Nexus RX 1000 watt

Display
Xerox XM7 22W - 1680x1050

OS
Windows 7 RC 64 bit

Driver
ATI Catalyst 9.12 Hotfix

Test software

•    3DMark Vantage
•    3DMark06
•    Far Cry 2
•    Batman Arkham Asylum
•    Resident Evil 5
•    Furmark v1.7.0
•    Call Of Juarez
•    Unigine Heaven

Benchmark

Now the time has come to see how the HD5870 GPU handles the chosen games and benchmark applications.

3DMark Vantage:

We start the first test with the newest benchmark program from Futuremark.

3DMark Vantage is a full-blooded DX10 test which is not backwards compatible with DX9, meaning it only works on Windows Vista and Windows 7.
The program tests with two GPU and two CPU tests, The GPU tests are very demanding and a fast card is needed to obtain good results.
Let us see how the card performs.


The HD5870 card beats both of the other ATI cards. However, it is only 1000 points in front of the two smaller HD5770 cards running in crossfire. Same story if we switch over to high; the Asus card is easily the fastest in both tests.

3DMark06:
3DMark06 has become a slightly dated benchmark test. The program only tests with DX9 on the GPUs, but the graphics are still pretty heavy and the test requires quite a lot from the processor as well.



The Asus HD5870 GPU is beaten all over by the two HD5770, no matter the resolution. However, the difference is quite small.

Unigine Heaven:
The Unigine Heaven benchmark program is the first official DX11 benchmark. The program tests the performance of the graphics card by playing a movie of a small village and measuring an average fps, giving a total score from that. The graphics are quite beautiful and very heavy on the GPU.
The program can also test in DX9, DX10 as well as OpenGL. The XFX HD4770 graphics card is not included in this test as it does not support DX11, only DX10.1.



Once again Asus HD5870 takes the cake from the smaller HD5770, but the difference is still minor.

Call Of Juarez:
Call Of Juarez is a slightly older game, but one of the few that can utilize multi-core processors, and it comes with DX10 support. The game takes place in the Wild West, and the graphics are good even if the game is a few years old.



The HD5870 and HD5770 cards are incredibly even in this test. However if we look at the average fps, we can see that the two HD5770 cards end up beating their elder brother.

Far Cry 2:
Far Cry 2 takes you deep into beautiful Africa, where you have to drive back and forth to solve a bunch of missions. The game offers a very large and open environment, giving you plenty of space to fool around. The graphics are very demanding and require a lot of the GPU if you want to run a high resolution with plenty of AA.
The game comes with a built-in benchmark program, which is quite useful if you want to find out how your PC handles the game at different resolutions and detail levels.



The results are slightly weird, for even though the HD5870 wins with ease on minimum and max fps, it is beaten to the ground by the two HD5770 cards when it comes to average fps. The older HD4770 card cannot even compete in this test and has to make do with a 12.88 average fps at a 1680x1050 resolution.

Resident Evil 5:
The newest Resident Evil game from Capcom. This time Africa is the stage for the fight between the zombies and the main characters.
The benchmark program we used here can run in both DX9 and DX10 – we used the latter. The graphics look great, but the game is not as GPU-intense as some of others.



Once again the HD5870 card has to watch itself be beaten by the two HD5770, who take a comfortable victory in this test.

Furmark v1.7.0:
The final test is the newest version of Furmark. This program is a standard test program on many of the bigger sites, with good reason; Furmark can handle OpenGL, and it comes with a burn in/stability function that can strain the GPU to extremes to find the maximum operational temperature of the card. It is also possible to see the actual temperature of the GPU during a stress test.



The HD5870 card wins in this test but is once again closely followed by the two HD5770 cards.

Overclocking

There is little doubt the HD5800 series is designed with overclocking in mind. The front of the box for this graphics card even states that you can boost performance by 17% via Smartdoctor!
The GPU comes with a volt regulator chip, meaning the card can be soft-modded. To make a long story short, it means you can increase the voltage of the GPU with, for example, Asus Smartdoctor without having to solder or mod the card in any other way to increase voltage.

The volt chip is also the reason that this card can reach mind-blowing speeds without breaking a sweat. We managed to overclock this card to 1000MHz core and 1300MHz RAM with 1.312 volt on the GPU.



In percentage terms, that amounts to:

•    850  MHz - 1000 MHz = 18% overclock on the GPU
•    1200 MHz - 1300 MHz = 8% overclock on the RAM

All benchmark tests were rerun to see if this overclock resulted in any noticeable performance boost.

3DMark Vantage:



The overclock can really be felt in Vantage, resulting in a greater score on performance, as well as a 1000 point boost on high.

3DMark06:



Here the overclock does not boost the results significantly, but at least you can see they have been improved compared to the standard speed of the card.

Unigine Heaven:



Same in the DX11 benchmark test; overclock improves all the results.

Call Of Juarez:



Call Of Juarez also benefits from the extra MHz on the card. The average fps result in the resolution 1680 x 1050 increased by about 10 fps, which is substantial.

Far Cry 2:



The slightly more demanding Far Cry 2 also likes the overclock, with performance rising all over.

Resident Evil 5:



The Resident Evil benchmark test also enjoys the overclock, with the average fps at 1680 x 1050 improving by about 10.

Furmark v1.7.0:



The result in Furmark is also higher all over, but the improvement is small.

Noise/power consumption

Noise:
The card does not make much noise at idle in Windows, and is pretty silent under the benchmark tests as well. However, just to give you an idea of how loud the card can be when the fan runs at 100%, you can hear it in action in this youtube video.

See the clip here

Power consumption:
For the power test we used a small flow meter which measures the overall watt consumption of the computer. The test setup is a very hungry Core i7 system, and is most likely not what you would use if you cared about your PC power consumption.

However, one of the most important features of the HD5800 series is the low power consumption. The HD5870 card uses only 27 watt when idle, which is very low for a high-end GPU, and according to ATi it has a TPD (thermal power design) of 188 watt. The HD4770 is unfortunately not included in the graph as it for some reason refused be stable in Windows. It later proved to be an issue with the new Catalyst 9.12 driver.
But let us see what the power consumption looks like.



The idle watt consumption without overclock is very decent, and the consumption at load is not all that high either. You can clearly see the watt consumption rise dramatically when the card is overclocked, however.
We have reached the end of our test, so let us jump to the conclusion and translate all those benchmark scores into words so we can give this graphics card a rating.

Conclusion

The Asus HD5870 has been a delight to test in all areas.
The performance is tip-top, as is the overclock result. The card is really easy and absolutely painless to overclock to a 1000MHz core, and it can easily go above that with a higher voltage. The card is also full of new technologies that help improve the gaming experience.
The card is very handsome when it comes to design. ATI have really hit the spot with the very extravagant cooler, and the beautiful black/red design.
The card is also cheap compared to its competitors. However, the length of the card might create problems for smaller cases.

    

Pros:
Very good performance
Price
Silent
Power consumption
Overclocking potential

Cons:
The length

Innovation:	4.5 / 5
Construction:	5 / 5
Accessories:	4 / 5
Performance:	5 / 5
Price:	4 / 5
Overall:	4.5 / 5