Conclusion

Today we had a chance to test another non-reference HD 5870 card. Our today’s guest was XFX’s HD 5870 Black Edition and the name suggests that this is no ordinary card. In fact, apart from higher clocks and in turn better performance, Black Edition cards bring some exclusive benefits to its owner – Priority Technical support, dibs on exclusive products, etc. The card comes with non-reference cooling, meaning XFX really went out of their way to deliver a quality product which can compete in style.

The first thing we thought about upon seeing the card was whether it was quiet. Indeed, the cooling turned out to be much more efficient as well as quieter than the reference solution. You probably know that the reference solution is quiet in idle mode, but while the HD 5870 Black Edition’s cooling isn’t inaudible when the GPU is under load, it sure is much quieter than the reference solution. Thanks to XFX’s efforts, the cooling is more efficient than the reference so you can manually make the fan quiet and retain silence even in 3D mode. Naturally, this will sacrifice some cooling efficiency, but know that you’ll manage to keep decent noise levels while keeping temperatures lower than on the reference card.

Black Edition cards run stable at higher operating clocks than reference, and you’ve seen that it does that all the while staying cooler and quieter than the reference card. The GPU runs at 900MHz, which is 50MHz higher than reference whereas the memory was pushed from the reference 4800MHz to 5000MHz.

Although Nvidia GTX 480 has taken the performance cake, the difference isn’t that drastic and HD 5870 owners will have nothing to complain about when it comes to gaming. Compared to the reference HD 5870, the Black Edition many times ran up to 5% faster, and even managed to beat the GTX 480 in some of the tests. Furthermore, if you’re looking for a card that will allow for three monitors on one graphics card, ATI’s Eyefinity is the graphics you’re looking for.

Black Edition will set you back some €50 more than the reference card, but there are some few pros to this card – it runs silent, comes with a free Aliens vs. Predator game, etc. If, however, silence is not something that plays a key factor when purchasing a graphics card, you can check out the rest of XFX’s offer, here, which surely packs something both for your taste and your wallet.