Gigabyte Radeon 5870 SOC review - Introduction

A bit of a trend these days among ATI's partners selling Radeon HD 5870 cards is literally 'who's got the biggest e-peen'. It is very nice to see them push the limit further and further in producing the fastest pre-overclocked Radeon HD 5870, yes I am talking about OC (overclock) models which ATI apparently allows to be made nowadays.

We have seen models from HIS, MSI, PowerColor, ASUS and now Gigabyte is releasing an overclocked Radeon HD 5870 as well. Gigabyte did it properly I can already state, they overhauled the PCB, used first rate components, changed the cooling solutions and badabing badaboom... there it is. The Radeon HD 5870 SOC edition graphics card.

Gigabyte's Radeon HD 5870 SOC is not 'just' a pre-overclocked card, they are really serious about it. At default this card comes clocked at a 950 MHz core and the memory is purring steady at 5000 MHz, so that's another 100 MHz on that core and another 200 MHz on the memory.

We'd almost forget that this obviously is a regular 5870 as well and thus comes DirectX 11 ready and can take advantage of DirectCompute, multi-threading, Hardware Tessellation and new shader 5.0 extensions. Another big feature of the product that you already learned about is of course Eyefinity, the ability to connect multiple monitors to your videocard and use it in a desktop environment, or to create an incredible wide monitor resolution to play games in. ATI has changed the rules as the Radeon HD 5870 has 1600 stream processors (shader processors). ATI literally doubled up everything inside that rv770 GPU and as such we spot a GPU die with 2.15 billion transistors.

Have a peek at the coolness in the photos over the next few pages and then let's start up a nice lengthy review to see if the SOC edition has got what it takes to be among the top ranking Radeon HD 5870 cards on the market.

Let's dive into the review, have a look at the product, test it, overclock it and well, just have swell ol' time.