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Sapphire Radeon HD5870 Video Card Review

Author: Will West

Overclocking a graphics card is a great way to get more power out of your money. Still there comes a time that if you have to biggest and meanest video card around. Does it really make sense to push it any farther?

We love to push everything beyond stock just to say we did it. So let's see what the Sapphire Radeon HD5870 has to give us.

Using the Catalyst Control Center from ATI we pushed and tested the Sapphire Radeon HD5870 to its workable limit. Too bad the limit was a short jump with only a small bump of 30 MHz on the graphics core and a 50 MHz jump on the memory.

Of course we are always looking for more and the biggest disappointment here was with the memory.  Anything over 50MHz and the system would lock up the system and require a reboot to recover.

Then again any gain over the stock speed is free, and we can only complain so much, if at all.

UT3 responded to the little bump up with some real number jumps. Pumping frame rates up as much as 20FPS on certain resolutions shows that the little bump in speed still was very powerful.

Nothing says bragging rights like like kicking out over 235FPS at 1680x1050.

The little overclock that was pushed out of the Radeon HD5870 did turn in a few more Frames Per Second, but nothing that is to impressive. Once again we see the strange 1680x1050 180FPS limit from L4D2 on the Sapphire Radeon HD5870 that still leaves me puzzled. Maybe driver glitches, but honestly at a 180FPS limit are we really losing anything?.