Category : Video Cards
Manufacturer : Asus

Posted by: Ian Jackson on 2010-03-19

Performance, overclocking and Conclusion

Performance

To evaluate the performance of the EAH5870 we compared it to ATi’s own reference design and its closest extant NVIDIA competitor – the GeForce GTX 285.

In all games the Asus delivers results identical to our ATi reference card. This is in line with what we’d expect from the EAH5870 as it has an identical specification. It does at least show that Asus’ custom BIOS has not hurt stock performance at all. What’s abundantly clear is that NVIDIA needs to rush out Fermi; only an idiot would invest in a GTX 285 at its currently inflated price when it is so soundly beaten by the 5800 series.

Overclocking

ATi includes a useful overclocking feature within the Catalyst drivers called Overdrive. Using this we were able to take the Asus to a respectable 900MHz GPU clock and 1300MHz memory clock, up from the defaults of 850MHz and 1200MHz respectively. This is broadly equivalent to the results we managed with the reference card.

In order to increase the Voltage of the EAH5870 you need to install the bundled SmartDoctor software. We are sorry to report this is an ugly and badly designed piece of software that relies on extremely fine mouse control to set your desired clock speeds. Nevertheless, it does allow you to raise the GPU voltage from its default of 1.15V to 1.3V. At this elevated setting we were able to take the GPU speed above the magic 1GHz to a maximum of 1010MHz before visible artefacts became apparent in FurMark. This is a highly impressive result, and increased our performance by a margin in line with expectations. Unfortunately it also had a perilous effect on the GPU temperature, which soared by more than thirty degrees Celsius. Although we didn’t see any artefacts the fan was roaring away at 100% and the card was too hot to touch. We’d certainly not recommend users run this card at 1.3V without water cooling.

At a more modest 1.25V the trade off between performance and temperature was much more acceptable, with a 15 degree rise at peak load. At this setting we were able to crank the core to 978MHz, which is a good increase over our results without the SmartDoctor software installed. To be honest we are not sure we could live with the software’s shortcomings on a daily basis. It fails to correctly set the voltages consistently after a reboot and fights with the superior Overdrive when it comes to setting your desired frequencies. This is a shame, as with some tweaking it could be an invaluable and powerful tweaking tool.

Conclusion

The Asus EAH5870 is a great example of ATi’s flagship single-GPU video card. It offers a better bundle than average and a generous three year warranty. The Voltage Tweak feature is also invaluable if you are the kind of user who likes to shoot for benchmark records. Until Asus improves the software we can’t see many users willing to put up with its shortcomings unless shooting for a one-off 3DMark record, but it’s essentially a free extra – one that no other manufacturer provides. At current pricing the Asus is also very competitive against other brands  like Powercolor, Sapphire and HIS. For that reason it’s a no-brainer – the Asus is the card to get.

Ian Jackson