ASUS EAH5870 Voltage Tweak Video Card

[Apoptosis]

ASUS EAH5870 Voltage Tweak Video Card

The ASUS EAH5870 graphics card with Voltage Tweak Technology offers up to a 38% more performance by unlocking the overclocking potential of the Radeon HD 5870. Read on to see how this card does when overclocked and what the SmartDoctor utility offers. It also comes with a product key for Colin McRae: DiRT 2 for those that like off-road racing games.

The ASUS EAH5870/2DIS/1GD5 graphics card is equipped with Voltage Tweak technology, as part of the SmartDoctor application and that is what makes this card stand out from the crowd. Without the SmartDoctor application it would be like any other ATI Radeon HD 5870 on the market today, but that is luckily not the case. The ASUS EAH5870 gives consumers the ability to adjust the GPU voltages and to overclock beyond what you can do using just the ATI OverDrive utility. Factor in that you also get a product key for Colin McRae: DiRT 2 and you have a really good value on your hands.

Article Title: ASUS EAH5870 Voltage Tweak Video Card
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1104/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $379.99

[Skippman]

Is this card based off the ATI reference design or as ASUS rearranged some of the components onboard like PowerColor did last time?

[Apoptosis]

Is this card based off the ATI reference design or as ASUS rearranged some of the components onboard like PowerColor did last time?

It's identical.... so it's 100% the ATI reference design other than the video cards BIOS, which enables the hooks for their software utilities for the voltage and clock frequency adjustments.

To quote my second paragraph from the article:

the ASUS EAH5870 Voltage Tweak is nothing more than the reference Radeon HD 5870 with some ASUS stickers on the plastic housing and on the cooling fan. The clock speeds are also stock, which means the 1,600 stream processors are running at 850MHz. The ASUS EAH5870's 1GB of quad-pumped GDDR5 memory is clocked at 1.2GHz (4.8GHz effective).

[Skippman]

I must have missed that. My appologies. I was concerned with whether or not this would support any of the full card waterblocks coming out from companies such as EK's and if it's refrence it certainly should.

[Apoptosis]

are you aware of any custom PCB's out on the market for the 5870?

I don't think I've seen any yet to my knowledge.

Companies like Palit that usually make custom PCBs seem to not even have a Radeon 5800 or 5700 series card out on the market right now. I know ASUS has a custom PCB design coming out soon though.

[Skippman]

No, I can't say as I do. But this could have been the first card. <shrugs>

I'm still a little peeved about buying the PowerColor 4870's last year and getting double burned by them. They wern't refrence design so I couldn't find a cooler for them AND they had a memory glitch that the only fix for was to underclock the RAM negating the entire point of buying those specific cards.

So from now on, I'm only going to buy refrence cards.




But I still don't like where the power connectors are.

[shaxs]

I just purchased all my parts for a new system from Newegg today.... in that list is the XFX 5870 (I wanted the 5850 but they sell out so fast and I was tired of waiting!). Anywhoo, since this is the same board, XFX could come out with a video bios tweak of their own right?

[stopthekilling77]

I just purchased all my parts for a new system from Newegg today.... in that list is the XFX 5870 (I wanted the 5850 but they sell out so fast and I was tired of waiting!). Anywhoo, since this is the same board, XFX could come out with a video bios tweak of their own right?

They could, but I doubt they will, maybe someone will crack the ASUS bios to work with other cards...