AMD Radeon HD 5870 - Card and Cooler
The first you notice when you see a Radeon HD 5870 card in from of you is there shear size of it. The card measures 275mm and the last 10 millimeters is only the cooler covering the card. This is around 15mm longer than Radeon HD 4870X2 sporting dual RV770 circuits there is nothing hiding the fact that Radeon HD 5870 is a proud card that, alas, may not fit inside all cases.
The card supports, like all Radeon HD 5000 models, three monitors, but actually has four outputs, two DVI-I outputs, one DisplayPort and one HDMI output. It’s worth mentioning that you have to use the DisplayPort output when running triple monitors, which we experienced the hard way. On the I/o bracket we also fund an exhaust that will let out the hot air coming off the card. The cool air is sucked in through two intakes at the rear of the card, and the the fan hole on the front.
 Outputs to go around |
 Air is sucked in through the rear |
The cooler covers both front and back of the card for some extra stability and protection, which doesn’t hurt when it measures near 28cm. The back offers no cooling though, since it is not in direct contact with any heat emitting components.
Even though Radeon HD 5870 is the card that emits the second most heat of the cards we have tests, only second to GeForce GTX 295, it is without doubt the quietest of the bunch. It’s a pretty impressive achievement when you consider that the card sucks in close to 190W at full load.
We didn’t have a decibel reader at our disposal, but when idle the card makes no noise what so ever and increase to blearily noticeable noise at heavy load. If we compare to GeForce GTX 295 the latter starts at the same level of noise as HD 5870 ends, The NVIDIA cards sounds like a tornado at full load. Even Radeon HD 4890 and GeForce GTX 285 is noticeably louder even if they are far from as bad as NVIDIA’s dual-GPU card.
AMD has done a great job with the cooler, which is of course a good thing for the many reference cards that are about to launch. Before we move on we will look at what hides beneath the impressive cooler.
