AMD announced the first DirectX 11 graphics card back in September 2009, and the card dubbed the HD 5870 ended up being the fastest single-GPU card up until the GTX 480 hit the shelves. Our today’s guest however, is XFX’s overclocked HD 5870 Black Edition card, the fastest card in XFX’s HD 5870 lineup. We heard about XFX’s Black Edition HD 5870 last year, and today we’ll see whether it was worth the wait.

Unlike the reference HD 5870, where the GPU runs at 850MHz, XFX decided to push the GPU to 900MHz and the memory from 4800MHz to 5000MHz. The overclock of course brings improved HD 5870 Black Edition performance, but we must say that the card also runs very quietly. Although the Black Edition’s GPU gets hotter than the reference one, XFX’s non-reference cooling takes care of temperatures and silent operation. We’re talking about a dual-slot cooler with a fan in the center and a large heatsink with 5 heatpipes.

HD 5870 is a part of AMD’s Evergreen graphics card family, and the card is not only fast and powerful, but comes with a plethora of features such as DirectX 11 hardware tessellation support, shader 5.0 extension, multi-threading, ATI Eyefinity, DirectCompute, OpenCL, stream computing, HDMI 1.3a (DTS Master Audio/Dolby True-HD).

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• READ MORE (Source): Fudzilla