The Radeon HD 5870 is massive, though given the specifications and the fact that this is a high-end graphics card, its size is far from surprising. The dimensions match that of the Radeon HD 4870 X2, making it very similar to the GeForce GTX 285 as well. The AMD reference card measures 28cm long and weighs roughly 1kg.
Cooling the “Cypress XT” GPU is a fairly large aluminum heatsink that is made up of 36 fins measuring 13.5cm long, 6.5cm wide, and 2.5cm tall. Connected to the base of the heatsink are four copper heatpipes which help improve efficiency. Cooling this heatsink is a 75x20mm blower fan that draws air in from within the case and pushes it out through the rear of the graphics card.
Like the Radeon HD 4870, we have found that the Radeon HD 5870 is a very quiet graphics card when at idle. With a claimed idle consumption level of just 27 watts, the Radeon HD 5870 has little reason to make any noise at idle. However when we began to game, the fan did spin up and make quite a noise, though it was similar to that of the Radeon HD 4870 or GeForce GTX 285 graphics cards, so nothing unusual here.
The new Radeon HD 5870 uses a 40nm design just as the Radeon HD 4770 series did. This has allowed ATI to be quite aggressive with the core speed, clocking it at 850MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a more impressive frequency of 1200MHz on this particular model. The GPU configuration features an incredible 1600 SPUs, along with 80 TAUs (Texture Address Units) and 32 ROPs (Rasterization Operator Units). That is twice as many SPUs, TAUs and ROPs as the current Radeon HD 4890 graphics card.
The heatsink and fan have been enclosed within a custom built housing that consumes the entire graphics card. This is the first time AMD has concealed the entire graphics card, and we much prefer this method as it protects the product very well. Nvidia on the other hand has been doing this for some time with their most prized graphics cards, such as the GeForce GTX 295.
As me mentioned a moment ago, the Radeon HD 5870 can consume up to 188 watts of power when pushed hard. In order to feed the graphics card enough power AMD has included a pair of 6-pin PCI Express power connectors. This is the same configuration that you will find on the Radeon HD 4870/4890 and GeForce GTX 285 graphics cards for example.
The Radeon HD 5870 also supports Crossfire technology, and therefore in the standard position is a pair of Crossfire connectors for bridging two or more cards together. The only other connectors can be found on the I/O panel, and our AMD sample featured two dual DVI connectors, along with a HDMI and Display Port connection. It is worth noting that all Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards can support a maximum resolution of 2560×1600 on not one but rather three monitors.
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