AMD replies - Overclocked HD 5870
When NVIDIA is on the war path so is the competition to make sure NVIDIA’s advances are futile. It’s obvious AMD will lose its 100% DirectX 11 dominance with the introduction of GTX 470 and 480, but it won’t let it happen without putting up a fight. AMD’s main weapon for this is overclocked version of HD 5870, something which has been restricted in the past, but the overclocks are no real monsters, but AMD is counting on fighting back back Fermi with small tweaks, as small as 25MHz extra Cypress clock.
XFX HD 5870 XXX Edition – clocked at 875/1250
That this relatively small increase from the reference clock frequencies (850/1200) that surprises us, since AMD doesn’t seem to expect much resistance from the GF100 core and NVIDIA. The actual situation is something we will look at in the benchmark section of this review, where XFX HD 5870 XXX Edition participates. These overclocked cards are available today.
XFX has even better model of Radeon HD 5870 coming, its Black Edition card will be clocked at 900MHz+ on the core and this is something others are planning too, where we have reported on cards from most of the major players.
That aside AMD is also panning to counter a possible dual-Fermi card with some custom HD 5970, for example ASUS ROG ARES, Sapphire HD 5970 4GB and XFX Radeon HD 5970 4GB Eyefinity6. These card are equipped with 4GB RAM, which should tend for high performance at extreme resolutions, availability unknown, but expect these cards in a few months.
