The market for Radeon HD 5870 video cards has matured since the launch of this top-tier GPU in September of 2009. In that time, the graphics card world has not stood still, and now that Fermi has finally launched, the title of fastest GPU belongs to the GTX480.

Development has continued on both the hardware side and the software side of the ATI family, and the ASUS EAH5870/2DIS/1GD5/V2is one of several new 58xx series cards released by ATI AIB partners in the last few months that follow a decidedly different design pattern. The complexity of the 5870 reference design has given way to a more focused approach that strips away the bells and whistles in favor of mastering the core competencies of modern graphics hardware. A robust power supply, an efficient cooling package, and a simpler system for voltage control; all add up to a bigger bang for the buck, higher reliability and more headroom for overclocking. Several vendors have been trying to find the right recipe for maximizing the value proposition of the Radeon HD5870, and this time Benchmark Reviews is going to look closely at the second generation Voltage Tweak model from ASUS.

Driver updates have been a constant source of improvement and anguish lately, nothing unusual there. ATI has had the DirectX 11 market to themselves for ten months, and their driver package is pretty stable. Too stable, some say, as they wait in vain for the “magic” driver that will unlock the hidden potential behind the HD 5xxx series of GPUs. Sorry folks, it’s unlikely to happen. Really; the performance of the Radeon HD5000 series is right where you would expect it to be, based on the number of stream processors, ROPs, memory bandwidth, and ATI’s chosen architecture. It’s only natural that they’ve targeted the last several releases at working a few kinks out of some of the more important features. At this point, there’s more potential gain in overclocking your card, and ASUS has provided SmartDoctor monitoring and control software to assist with that. With software voltage control, it’s easy to explore the outer limits of the HD 5870 and gain 10-15% improvements in gaming performance.

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