Cooling

The cooling system is not radically different from what we saw in the RADEON HD 4870/4890. The heatsink is bigger and has a different shape.

It's a turbine-type cooler that drives air through the heatsink inside a long plastic housing with a turbine installed at one end. Hot air is ejected out of a system unit, so the card with its cooling system takes up two slots.

We monitored temperatures using RivaTuner.

ATI RADEON HD 5870 1024MB

ATI RADEON HD 5870 1024MB overclocked

Operating temperatures are surprisingly low, they do not exceed 80°C, which is a unique case for modern Hi-End graphics cards. And the cooler remains quiet at that.

Pay special attention to overclocking! Yep, despite our rule not to overclock graphics cards (except those cases, when a product is designed for overclockers), we decided to try the new card at increased frequencies. The HD 5870 was stable, even when we increased the core clock by 100MHz! It's a fantastic result, considering that we didn't use any special coolers or overclocking conditions. Everything was done in usual conditions in the same testbed PC enclosure.

We ran the card at increased frequencies only in game tests, because synthetic tests specialize in comparison of nominal operating modes. Details will be analyzed below.

But prior to that, we should describe our testbed configuration.

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