Introduction
ASUS is a Taiwanese computer hardware manufacturer, best known as a builder of high-quality mainboards for mainstream and enthusiast desktop PCs.
Over the many years the company has been in business, it has expanded its business into graphics cards, sound cards, notebooks, Netbooks, displays, and many other product lines.
It is perhaps one of the best-known hardware manufacturers in the business, and it would be very hard to find a gamer or other hardware enthusiast who has not owned an ASUS product, or is not familiar with the brand.
Today, we’re going to examine one of ASUS’s newly re-designed Radeon HD 5870 graphics card, the ASUS EAH5870 V2 STALKER Edition. It features an ATI Radeon HD 5870 GPU paired with 1GB of GDDR5, a slightly higher GPU frequency and a game bundle all for $448.
AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5870 GPU
AMD launched the ATI Radeon HD 5870 GPU about 11 months ago, on September 22nd, 2009. It was the first DX11 GPU to market, and also introduced us to AMD’s Eyefinity technology. The GPU sports 1,600 stream processors, 80 texture units, and 32 render backend units, or raster operators, packed into a 2.15 billion transistor ASIC. AMD’s design called for the GPU to be shipped originally with 1GB of GDDR5, though 2GB models soon followed.
The reference specification configured the GPU to run at 850MHz with the memory clocked at 4.8GHz DDR, bringing a theoretical limit of 153.6GB per second of memory bandwidth.
Some months later, NVIDIA joined the DirectX 11 party with the launch of their GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 products. Performance turned out to be very good with the GTX 480 and GTX 470, though power draw and heat generation have been problems with those products since they launched.
The ASUS EAH5870 V2 STALKER Edition
The ASUS EAH5870 V2 STALKER Edition is a fully customized and re-designed product from ASUS, built upon the Radeon HD 5870 GPU platform. It uses the same GPU and memory specification from AMD’s reference design, but with a custom cooling device and a custom Printed Circuit Board.
The GPU on the EAH5870 V2 is clocked slightly higher than AMD’s reference design, coming in at 868MHz versus 850MHz reference specification. The 1GB of GDDR5 is clocked at 1.2GHz, or 4.8GHz DDR, matching AMD’s reference design. The video card is in stock right now for $448.
The packaging prominently features character art from the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, which is bundled with the video card. The front of the box features a number of icons, describing some of the key features of the contained video card.
The backside of the box is standard, mostly listing features and system requirements. There is also a large graphic indicating that voltage tweaking is possible on this video card.
The soft bundle with this video card comes with manual CD-ROM and a driver disc, which also contains GamerOSD, SmartDoctor, and Splendid. GamerOSD is ASUS’ in-game overclocking software, while SmartDoctor handles hardware monitoring as well as overclocking. Splendid is a motion video color correction software package. Also included is a printed setup guide and a small card, which is actually be a coupon for activating S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat on Steam.
The hardware bundle features a dual-Molex to 6-pin auxiliary power connector adaptor, a dual-6-pin auxiliary power to single-8-pin auxiliary power adaptor, a DVI to VGA adaptor, an HDMI to adaptor, and a single CrossFire bridge.
The ASUS EAH5870 V2 features the familiar AMD colors: black and red (which reminds us of our favorite website). The ASUS EAH5870 V2 is 10″ long, not including the PCI bracket, which is approximately one inch shorter than AMD’s reference card. There is a large fan measuring 8.5 centimeters in diameter toward the rear end of the video card.
It is a sealed cooling device, so that air that enters the fan will be forced out of the back of the case via ventilation slots in the PCI slot bracket. ASUS claims that the 8.5cm fan combined with the heat-sink’s “pure copper” cooling fins results in 17% better cooling efficiency than AMD’s reference cooler. You will also notice that the corners of the PCB are beveled.
The power connectors are found on the back edge of the video card, instead of on the top edge opposite the PCI-express connector. This may cause clearance problems for the required power cables in some cases, but as the video card is shorter than the reference design, it should not cause a problem for too many users.
The business end of this video card features one dual-link DVI connector, one HDMI connector, and one DisplayPort connector. It also features a large slotted vent for heat to escape the cooling device.
The back of the EAH5870 V2 has the usual miniscule surface mounted electronic components and a spring-steel bracket which helps keep the cooling device securely mated to the surface of the GPU.
Evaluation Method
We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and “eye candy” graphical settings.
We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing based on real gameplay as well.
Test System Setup
For our test system platform we are using an ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution motherboard with an Intel Core i7 920 overclocked to 3.6GHz, and 6GB of Corsair DDR3-1600. For the power supply, we will be using a CoolerMaster Real Power Pro 1250W.
While it might be “overkill,” we use the Core i7-920 processor at 3.6GHz in an attempt to prevent our evaluation from being CPU limited.
Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the i7-920 at 3.6GHz seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.
We are using the full Steam version of Aliens vs. Predator. We are doing today’s testing in this game with all the video cards running in DX11 mode. In the game we can toggle Tessellation and the advanced Shadows in DX11.
Under the DX11 options we can also enable 2X or 4X antialiasing. The other in-game settings are Texture Quality, Shadow Complexity, Ambient Occlusion, Motion Blur and Anisotropic Filtering, which were all at their highest levels for testing. In this evaluation we are using the Predator Mission, Refinery level for testing.
In the refinery level, none of our video cards could maintain a playable framerate with the AA option set to 4X when running at 2560×1600. In other parts of the game, it wasn’t as much of a problem, but in that level, the gameplay was just not smooth enough for our liking with 4X AA enabled on any of the three video cards in this review.
However, at 2560×1600, 2X AA was playable on all three cards, along with maximum in-game setting selected and both DX11 options enabled.
The GeForce GTX 480 gave us the strongest performance, while the ASUS EAH5870 V2 STALKER Edition trailed by about 12%. The reference design Radeon HD 5870 trailed by another 1.5 frames per second, making it 15% slower than the GeForce GTX 480 in this game. In summary, all three video cards ended up providing the same gameplay experience, despite the framerate differences.
ARMA II: Operation Arrowhead is a military simulator developed by Bohemia Interactive, featuring realistic simulations of battles in a fictional middle-eastern nation called Takistan. During our testing, we found that optimizing performance in Operation Arrowhead was less about improving framerates, and more about improving the responsiveness of controls.
With high settings, we sometimes observed relatively high framerates even when there was so much input lag and choppiness that the game was simply not playable.
For our testing scenario, we loaded up the single-player scenario called “A Walk In The Hills”, in which our Army unit was sent to investigate sightings of armed militia in a small desert village.
Source:http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/08/30/asus_eah5870_v2_stalker_edition_video_card_review/1
