Anandtech has posted a review of three overclocked Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards: Sapphire’s Radeon HD 5870 Toxic 2GB, MSI’s Radeon HD 5870 Lightning, and Gigabyte’s Radeon HD 5870 Super Overclock. These three cards are clearly in the high-end gaming category and all three boast such a price since they retail for around $500. How well do they perform? While they are all faster than the Radeon HD 5870 (of course), they all come slower than the Radeon HD 5970, which is to be expected. Also, don’t look to overclock them much as they are already right at the edge of what the graphics chip can handle.
Looking at the larger issues, we haven’t mentioned price too much up until now since the focus of this article is the roundup, but at $480-$500 for these cards it’s time to discuss the issue. Even when overclocked these cards are only at most 10% faster than a reference Radeon 5870 for a 20%-25% higher price. These are luxury cards that are not cost-effective, and at $500 are running right in to NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 480.
