This ATI Radeon 5870 video card arrived today. This thing is a beast, and that is definitely a good thing. I will snap some more images during the install, and then run some tests on this thing.
I had to change my power supply and since it is so long, i had to remove the internal bottom half HD bay casing to have it fit on the Motherboard (and move the HDs in the CD bay). But it was worth it!
Dude.
Two 5870s.
Yield practically no performance increase.
But grats, its a great card. The crossfire drivers are kinda buggy for some things though.
Why are people so impressed? Video cards have been super huge for about 5 years now.
My 5750, 5770, x1900xt 512, 8800 gts 640, gtx 260 and upcoming 5970 all are super huge.
If anything, the ati 5xxx series is SMALL compared to how large the gtx 280 and 295 were! The gtx 260 goes thru the middle fan area of my antec 900.
My graphics card is the size of a small sticky note and it can run any game in low settings and most games with high settings.
Spence...it seems you get alot of new tech...are you lucky enough to get cards for testing purposes or do you have to buy these out of your pocket?
I just wish ATI would get the single-slot succesor to the 4850 out. The 4850 is a wonderful card; powerful enough to run almost everything and it doesn't need a beast of a power supply. The 5850 is a dual-slot monster. I just need a single-slot card that can run on a 360 Watt power supply.
I bought a 5750 ... what they don't tell you is that you need to have an active display port adapter if you plan on doing a triple screen configuration. It's taken me a lot of frustration to find this out. Ugh. But still a rockin card.
The 4850 is good, but I've found that you really have to keep the vents free of dust when you run games like Crysis. Otherwise it overheats itself.
Those two slot cards look nice, but some modem thing that I don't use takes up the output slot right below the slot that my 4850 uses, so if I upgrade I'll have to tinker around with that. Nice design idea, Gateway...
I used to run 4870's but always seemed to have little problems here and there, made the switch to EVGA GTX 295 a while back, and love it, have not had any problems whatsoever,i might be that i am jinxed with ATI, even my ATI tv tuner didnt work properly, but this 295 while a little steep in price, the performance is spectacular, especially when i am working on digital pictures and videos
You can only connect 3 monitors at any given time to this card. There is an upcoming version that will support Eyefinity6 for 6 monitors at once.
Am running the 5870 myself, loving it so far, it had been a long, long time since I had been anywhere near the top of the video card food-chain.
The 5870 is 5/8s of an inch longer than a 260. Bah quote didn't work. I saw dethadder said it looked a smidge smaller. I had to cut reliefs in my hard drive cages when I replaced my GTX260s with my 5870s. (5870 CrossfireX am a suk atm)
In my defense, I was judging by his KB which is very different design than mine . Your are correct though. In a review it says it is 11.1 inches long, whilst my BFGTech GTX260 OC2 is 10.5". I think I'd also have to cut into the HD cage to shoehorn it in my tower.
I just wanted to put it out there. I'm sure there are plenty of people that wouldn't be thrilled to have to take a dremel to there pieces parts to stuff these things in. I hear the 5970 has about an inch on the 5870....
